XZ-format compression library XZ is the successor to the Lempel-Ziv/Markov-chain Algorithm compression format, which provides memory-hungry but powerful compression (often better than bzip2) and fast, easy decompression. The native format of liblzma is XZ; it also supports raw (headerless) streams and the older LZMA format used by lzma. (For 7-Zip's related format, use the p7zip package instead.)