HDF5 version 1.14.4-1 released on April 12, 2024
Do not use the "Source code" (tar.gz/zip) files as they are auto-generated and not the released source.
This is a maintenance release with a few changes and updates:
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Added support for _Float16 16-bit floating-point datatype
Support for the 16-bit floating-point _Float16 C type has been added to
HDF5. On platforms where this type is available, this can enable more
efficient storage of floating-point data when an application doesn't
need the precision of larger floating-point datatypes. It can also allow
for improved performance when converting between 16-bit floating-point
data and data of another HDF5 datatype. -
Improved type conversion performance
As a part of the _Float16 work, the type conversion code was overhauled,
which has improved the performance of type conversion code. The speedup
varies depending on the datatypes involved, but can be upwards of 10x
for compound types and 100x when converting floats to integers where the
library doesn't have a fast conversion path available from the compiler. -
Added improvements for cloud-optimized HDF5
As a part of our continued push to improve access to HDF5 files stored in the
cloud, we've added a few things to make working with cloudy HDF5 files more
efficient:-
Page buffering setup is now more tolerant of being used with HDF5 files
that did not use paged storage. This avoids having to open/close/re-open
the file to determine appropriate page buffering settings. -
Added support for temporary credentials with the read-only S3 VFD
-
-
Added build system improvements
We are always working to ensure that HDF5 can be built on a wide variety of
systems with the latest compilers. In this release, we've incorporated some
improvements, including:- Further improvements to cross-compiling
- Support for the new standards-compliant MSVC preprocessor
- Better support for Cygwin and MinGW, particularly with the Autotools
- Many other build system tweaks
If you have a system that has problems building HDF5, please let us know on
the HDF Group Forum (https://forum.hdfgroup.org/) -
Fixed many CVE issues
Many soon-to-be-reported CVE issues were fixed in this release. These are
similar to previously reported CVE issues in that they involve file parsing
errors that generally result in a segfault. They are usually rated as
medium severity by NIST. These issues do not have official CVE numbers yet.With these fixes, HDF5 will once again be CVE-free.
-
The release tag in GitHub will be hdf5_1.14.4
We used to use tags with names like hdf5-1_14_3, but we've been informed
that dashes are forbidden in version strings by many package management
schemes. If a patch release is necessary, we'll simply append another
dot and number - e.g. hdf5_1.14.4.2 (instead of our previous hdf5-1_14_4-2). -
Many other improvements and bugfixes!
Please see the full release notes for detailed information regarding this
release, including a detailed list of changes.