The developer of the open source 7-Zip archiving application, Igor Pavlov, has released the first fixed version of the 2021 application.
The new version 7-Zip 21.05 is available on the official website. You can check the version of the application you are using from the Help - About 7-Zip path
The update of the 7-Zip application to version 21.05 is the first major stable release for quite some time now, since the last version 19.00, was released in February 2019. Since then several alpha and beta versions have been released, but 21.05 is the first new stable version of the archiving application. Alpha releases for Linux and Mac OS X.
The following is a list of major changes compared to the latest fixed version 19.00:
- Support for decompression b64 files (Base64 encoding).
- 7-Zip supports SHA-1 and SHA-256 which supports the new AMD Ryzen and Intel hardware. This improves the performance of some functions, including encryptionand ZIP AES decryption, hash value calculations and key generation speed for encryption and decryption in archives 7z, ZIP and RAR.
- Improved ZIP AES encryption and 7z, RAR and ZIP AES decryption.
- Compression time has been improved.
- The default number of LZMA2 chunks per solid blocks has been increased to 7z files, which improves the compression speed for large 7z files on devices with a large number of CPU cores.
- Speed improvements to ARM64 for AES, CRC-32, SHA-1 and SHA-256.
- Maximum dictionary size for LZMA / LZMA2 compression functions increased to 4 Gigabytes.
- The decompression speed of LZMA and LZMA2 files on ARM64, Mac OS and Linux versions has been improved by about 20-60%.
- 7-Zip can create a file.sha256 text file, which contains all the filenames and checksum SHA-256. The program can also check the file to verify the files.
Read more, and download the application