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-
-XZ Utils FAQ
-============
-
-Q: What do the letters XZ mean?
-
-A: Nothing. They are just two letters, which come from the file format
- suffix .xz. The .xz suffix was selected, because it seemed to be
- pretty much unused. It has no deeper meaning.
-
-
-Q: What are LZMA and LZMA2?
-
-A: LZMA stands for Lempel-Ziv-Markov chain-Algorithm. It is the name
- of the compression algorithm designed by Igor Pavlov for 7-Zip.
- LZMA is based on LZ77 and range encoding.
-
- LZMA2 is an updated version of the original LZMA to fix a couple of
- practical issues. In context of XZ Utils, LZMA is called LZMA1 to
- emphasize that LZMA is not the same thing as LZMA2. LZMA2 is the
- primary compression algorithm in the .xz file format.
-
-
-Q: There are many LZMA related projects. How does XZ Utils relate to them?
-
-A: 7-Zip and LZMA SDK are the original projects. LZMA SDK is roughly
- a subset of the 7-Zip source tree.
-
- p7zip is 7-Zip's command-line tools ported to POSIX-like systems.
-
- LZMA Utils provide a gzip-like lzma tool for POSIX-like systems.
- LZMA Utils are based on LZMA SDK. XZ Utils are the successor to
- LZMA Utils.
-
- There are several other projects using LZMA. Most are more or less
- based on LZMA SDK. See <http://7-zip.org/links.html>.
-
-
-Q: Why is liblzma named liblzma if its primary file format is .xz?
- Shouldn't it be e.g. libxz?
-
-A: When the designing of the .xz format began, the idea was to replace
- the .lzma format and use the same .lzma suffix. It would have been
- quite OK to reuse the suffix when there were very few .lzma files
- around. However, the old .lzma format became popular before the
- new format was finished. The new format was renamed to .xz but the
- name of liblzma wasn't changed.
-
-
-Q: Do XZ Utils support the .7z format?
-
-A: No. Use 7-Zip (Windows) or p7zip (POSIX-like systems) to handle .7z
- files.
-
-
-Q: I have many .tar.7z files. Can I convert them to .tar.xz without
- spending hours recompressing the data?
-
-A: In the "extra" directory, there is a script named 7z2lzma.bash which
- is able to convert some .7z files to the .lzma format (not .xz). It
- needs the 7za (or 7z) command from p7zip. The script may silently
- produce corrupt output if certain assumptions are not met, so
- decompress the resulting .lzma file and compare it against the
- original before deleting the original file!
-
-
-Q: I have many .lzma files. Can I quickly convert them to the .xz format?
-
-A: For now, no. Since XZ Utils supports the .lzma format, it's usually
- not too bad to keep the old files in the old format. If you want to
- do the conversion anyway, you need to decompress the .lzma files and
- then recompress to the .xz format.
-
- Technically, there is a way to make the conversion relatively fast
- (roughly twice the time that normal decompression takes). Writing
- such a tool would take quite a bit of time though, and would probably
- be useful to only a few people. If you really want such a conversion
- tool, contact Lasse Collin and offer some money.
-
-
-Q: I have installed xz, but my tar doesn't recognize .tar.xz files.
- How can I extract .tar.xz files?
-
-A: xz -dc foo.tar.xz | tar xf -
-
-
-Q: Can I recover parts of a broken .xz file (e.g. a corrupted CD-R)?
-
-A: It may be possible if the file consists of multiple blocks, which
- typically is not the case if the file was created in single-threaded
- mode. There is no recovery program yet.
-
-
-Q: Is (some part of) XZ Utils patented?
-
-A: Lasse Collin is not aware of any patents that could affect XZ Utils.
- However, due to the nature of software patents, it's not possible to
- guarantee that XZ Utils isn't affected by any third party patent(s).
-
-
-Q: Where can I find documentation about the file format and algorithms?
-
-A: The .xz format is documented in xz-file-format.txt. It is a container
- format only, and doesn't include descriptions of any non-trivial
- filters.
-
- Documenting LZMA and LZMA2 is planned, but for now, there is no other
- documentation than the source code. Before you begin, you should know
- the basics of LZ77 and range-coding algorithms. LZMA is based on LZ77,
- but LZMA is a lot more complex. Range coding is used to compress
- the final bitstream like Huffman coding is used in Deflate.
-
-
-Q: I cannot find BCJ and BCJ2 filters. Don't they exist in liblzma?
-
-A: BCJ filter is called "x86" in liblzma. BCJ2 is not included,
- because it requires using more than one encoded output stream.
- A streamable version of BCJ2-style filtering is planned.
-
-
-Q: I need to use a script that runs "xz -9". On a system with 256 MiB
- of RAM, xz says that it cannot allocate memory. Can I make the
- script work without modifying it?
-
-A: Set a default memory usage limit for compression. You can do it e.g.
- in a shell initialization script such as ~/.bashrc or /etc/profile:
-
- XZ_DEFAULTS=--memlimit-compress=150MiB
- export XZ_DEFAULTS
-
- xz will then scale the compression settings down so that the given
- memory usage limit is not reached. This way xz shouldn't run out
- of memory.
-
- Check also that memory-related resource limits are high enough.
- On most systems, "ulimit -a" will show the current resource limits.
-
-
-Q: How do I create files that can be decompressed with XZ Embedded?
-
-A: See the documentation in XZ Embedded. In short, something like
- this is a good start:
-
- xz --check=crc32 --lzma2=preset=6e,dict=64KiB
-
- Or if a BCJ filter is needed too, e.g. if compressing
- a kernel image for PowerPC:
-
- xz --check=crc32 --powerpc --lzma2=preset=6e,dict=64KiB
-
- Adjust the dictionary size to get a good compromise between
- compression ratio and decompressor memory usage. Note that
- in single-call decompression mode of XZ Embedded, a big
- dictionary doesn't increase memory usage.
-
-
-Q: Will xz support threaded compression?
-
-A: It is planned and has been taken into account when designing
- the .xz file format. Eventually there will probably be three types
- of threading, each method having its own advantages and disadvantages.
-
- The simplest method is splitting the uncompressed data into blocks
- and compressing them in parallel independent from each other.
- Since the blocks are compressed independently, they can also be
- decompressed independently. Together with the index feature in .xz,
- this allows using threads to create .xz files for random-access
- reading. This also makes threaded decompression possible, although
- it is not clear if threaded decompression will ever be implemented.
-
- The independent blocks method has a couple of disadvantages too. It
- will compress worse than a single-block method. Often the difference
- is not too big (maybe 1-2 %) but sometimes it can be too big. Also,
- the memory usage of the compressor increases linearly when adding
- threads.
-
- Match finder parallelization is another threading method. It has
- been in 7-Zip for ages. It doesn't affect compression ratio or
- memory usage significantly. Among the three threading methods, only
- this is useful when compressing small files (files that are not
- significantly bigger than the dictionary). Unfortunately this method
- scales only to about two CPU cores.
-
- The third method is pigz-style threading (I use that name, because
- pigz <http://www.zlib.net/pigz/> uses that method). It doesn't
- affect compression ratio significantly and scales to many cores.
- The memory usage scales linearly when threads are added. This isn't
- significant with pigz, because Deflate uses only a 32 KiB dictionary,
- but with LZMA2 the memory usage will increase dramatically just like
- with the independent-blocks method. There is also a constant
- computational overhead, which may make pigz-method a bit dull on
- dual-core compared to the parallel match finder method, but with more
- cores the overhead is not a big deal anymore.
-
- Combining the threading methods will be possible and also useful.
- E.g. combining match finder parallelization with pigz-style threading
- can cut the memory usage by 50 %.
-
- It is possible that the single-threaded method will be modified to
- create files identical to the pigz-style method. We'll see once
- pigz-style threading has been implemented in liblzma.
-
-
-Q: How do I build a program that needs liblzmadec (lzmadec.h)?
-
-A: liblzmadec is part of LZMA Utils. XZ Utils has liblzma, but no
- liblzmadec. The code using liblzmadec should be ported to use
- liblzma instead. If you cannot or don't want to do that, download
- LZMA Utils from <http://tukaani.org/lzma/>.
-
-
-Q: The default build of liblzma is too big. How can I make it smaller?
-
-A: Give --enable-small to the configure script. Use also appropriate
- --enable or --disable options to include only those filter encoders
- and decoders and integrity checks that you actually need. Use
- CFLAGS=-Os (with GCC) or equivalent to tell your compiler to optimize
- for size. See INSTALL for information about configure options.
-
- If the result is still too big, take a look at XZ Embedded. It is
- a separate project, which provides a limited but significantly
- smaller XZ decoder implementation than XZ Utils. You can find it
- at <http://tukaani.org/xz/embedded.html>.
-