rsync on the official rsync mirror (rsync.repo.almalinux.org) has been updated to 3.2.3 with xxHash support.  This means that rsync w/xxhash is now available for consumption by all mirrors.

The upstream rsync version available in EL8 (currently 3.1.3) is too old to support xxHash so we've made available a backported RPM from CentOS 9 Stream with xxHash support compiled.  rsync 3.2.3-9.el8.1 is available at http://repo.almalinux.org/backports/8/x86_64/rsync/.  It depends on the xxhash-libs package from EPEL.

If your mirror is on EL8 you can easily update to this version of rsync with the following commands:

No further action is required and your mirror will now sync from rsync.repo.almalinux.org using the xxHash algorithm.

xxHash is a great improvement to rsync as it provides faster, more CPU efficient hashing allowing higher transfer rates to be obtained.

There is a good article about rsync+xxhash and benchmarks available at https://community.centminmod.com/threads/custom-rsync-3-2-3-rpm-builds-with-xxhash-zstd-support-for-centos-7.20768/

Jonathan Wright
AlmaLinux Foundation