[$] Format-specific compression with OpenZL

LWN.net - Linux stuff - Wednesday, January 14, 2026
Lossless data compression is an important tool for reducing the storage requirements of the world's ever-growing data sets. Yann Collet developed the LZ4 algorithm and designed the Zstandard (or Zstd) algorithm; he came to the 2025 Open Source Summit Japan in Tokyo to talk about where data compression goes from here. It turns out that we have reached a point where general-purpose algorithms are only going to provide limited improvement; for significant increases in compression, while keeping computation costs within reason for data-center use, turning to format-specific techniques will be needed.