OpenZL compression on Mageia 's RPMs?

[thealio]

Hi,

During this week , I've read about the Developement of a new compression format by Meta , openzl:

https://engineering.fb.com/2025/10/06/d ... framework/

https://github.com/facebook/openzl

I remember that Arch had great benefits when they switched to Zstandard (zstd) .

I would like to know if openzl compression format would be compatible with rpm packaging, and , if yes, if it would be a good adoption for the future of Mageia

[doktor5000]

This is probably the wrong place to ask, there are no active packagers reading the forum.
You may want to either ask this on the dev mailing list https://ml.mageia.org/l/info/dev
or put it in an enhancement request: https://wiki.mageia.org/en/How_to_report_a_bug_properly

[thealio]

Hi

I send an email to dev@ml.mageia.org

Thank you

[morgano]

Strange, i could not find a message with "OpenZL" in dev mail list?

BTW, did you contact atelier team about your icon theme?

[sturmvogel]

1. it is developed by Meta
2. the first release was Oct 2025 (so not reliable yet for use in stable distributions)
3. see warnings on their github. they develop this stuff for their usage (Facebook). They don't guarantee stability/compatibility. So not usable for stable linux distributions
4. and many more...

And sometimes it helps to read the very first chapter of a project description on github:
"It is designed for engineers that deal with large quantities of specialized datasets (like AI workloads for example) and require high speed for their processing pipelines."
Or the offical documentation:
"much stronger ratios than generic compressors, at the speeds required by datacenter workloads."

Due to the small amount of data used in the rpm meta data, there wouldn't be any reallife advantage for using openzl. It has advantages for Meta's use case like data centers and LLMs and other "big" stuff.

Do you know what the data compression/decompression speed of the zstd is? It is 220MB/s compression, 850MB/s decompression. And now tell us what the advantage of even more speed would be for some MB of rpm meta data (and additionally have a look at the typical r/w speed of basic customer HDDs/SSDs...). The biggest meta data file is for the core updates repo with actually 400MB.

I remember that Arch had great benefits when they switched to Zstandard (zstd)

You may want to read the Mageia 9 release notes.
https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Mageia_9_Rel ... es#Stage_1
https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Mageia_9_Rel ... _and_urpmi

[thealio]

Thank you for your reply

This clarifies a lot

Glad to know zstandard has already been implemented in mageia

[doktor5000]

Due to the small amount of data used in the rpm meta data, there wouldn't be any reallife advantage for using openzl.

FWIW, this is not only about the RPM metadata (which BTW is uncompressed) or the repository metadata. The actual data contained in RPM packages is also compressed using that.
RPM consists of an uncompressed metadata header part, and a compressed cpio archive which contains the actual files. Nowadays this is compressed using zstd (before that xz/lzma, bzip2, gzip and so on)

So there would be actual improvements in reducing the binary RPM sizes and also the decompression speed which benefits all RPM installations, basesystem installation and also updates.


But apart from that you're probably correct, this is not mature enough and also not meant for mostly binary data.

[morgano]

There is also the point of being able to use rpm packages from third party or other distros, or previous Mageia release in some cases.
If changing, it must not disrupt this, or pose much delay in development or pause in updates to a supported release.