xz
xz is the container format maintained by Lasse Collin that wraps LZMA2 compression streams, offering high compression ratios with integrity checks; it is the basis of .tar.xz.
Purpose
It replaced bzip2 in modern Linux distributions, delivering higher compression with faster decompression.
Mechanism
A container header plus one or more LZMA2 compressed blocks, optional CRC32/64 or SHA-256 integrity checks, and an index and footer. Multi-threading and random-access decompression are supported.
Use cases
- Linux package distribution
- High-ratio archiving
- Kernel image compression