7-Zip 21.05: first stable version of 2021 released

The developer of the open source archiver 7-Zip, Igor Pavlov, released the first stable version of the application of 2021, 7-Zip 21.05.

The new version is already available on the official website. You can check the installed version by selecting Help > About 7-Zip in the application interface.

7-Zip 21.05

7-Zip 21.05 is the first major stable version in a while. The last release dates back to version 19.00, released in February 2019. Several alpha and beta versions have been released since then, but 21.05 is the first new stable version of the archiver. Alpha builds for Linux and Mac OS X were released.

Here is the list of important changes when compared to the last stable version, 7-Zip 19.00:

• Support for unpacking b64 files (Base64 encoding).
• 7-Zip supports new hardware instructions for SHA-1 and SHA-256 which new AMD Ryzen and Intel CPU's support; this improves the performance of certain operations, including encrypting and decrypting ZIP AES, hash value calculations, and the speed of key derivation for encryption and decryption in 7z, ZIP and RAR archives.
• ZIP AES encryption and 7z, RAR and ZIP AES decryption improved.
• Improved compression ratio for fast and fastest compression levels.
• Default number of LZMA2 chunks per solid blocks increased in 7z archives, which improves the compression speed for large 7z archives on devices with a large number of CPU cores and threads.
• The -ssp command line switches prevents that the system modifies the "last access time" property of source files for archiving and hashing operations.
• ARM64 version speed improvements for AES, CRC-32, SHA-1 and SHA-256.
• Maximum dictionary size for LZMA/LZMA2 compression operations was increased to 4 Gigabytes.
• Decompression speed of LZMA and LZMA2 archives in ARM64 versions for Mac OS and Linux improved by 20-60%.
• 7-Zip writes an additional field for the filename in UTF-8 encoding in ZIP archives.
• The number of working CPU threads is removed for compression if the RAM size is not enough for compression operations with large LZMA2 dictionaries.
• 7-Zip may create the text file file.sha256, which contains all file names and SHA-256 checksums. The program may also check the file to verify files.
• Add to Archive window supports setting a memory usage limit.

Interested users can check out the full changelog here.

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