[ANNOUNCE] erofs-utils: release 1.8

[ANNOUNCE] erofs-utils: release 1.8

[Gao Xiang]

Hi folks,

A new version erofs-utils 1.8 is available at:
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/xiang/erofs-utils.git tags/v1.8

It mainly includes the following changes:

   - (mkfs.erofs) support multi-threaded compression (Yifan Zhao);
   - support Intel IAA hardware accelerator with Intel QPL;
   - add preliminary Zstandard support;
   - (erofsfuse) use FUSE low-level APIs and support multi-threading (Li Yiyan);
   - (mkfs.erofs) support tar source without data (Mike Baynton);
   - (mkfs.erofs) support incremental builds (incomplete, EXPERIMENTAL);
   - (mkfs.erofs) other build performance improvements;
   - (erofsfuse) support building erofsfuse as a static library (ComixHe);
   - various bugfixes and cleanups (Sandeep Dhavale, Noboru Asai,
           Luke T. Shumaker, Yifan Zhao, Hongzhen Luo and Tianyi Liu).

It has been long time since the last release, mainly due to several new
major features and limited incremental builds.  However, it'd be better
not to hold it off any longer, as users have asked for multi-threaded
mkfs support.

In the future erofs-utils versions, we are going to improve incremental
builds, support multi-threaded mkfs for fragments and compressed data
deduplication, multi-threaded fsck/extraction as well as more remote
storage (e.g. HTTP, S3 and OCI registries), stabilize liberofs APIs for
3rd-party applications and eventually find a way to integrate a Rust
version [1].  Also see [2].

Feedback and contribution, as always, are welcomed.

[1] https://github.com/ToolmanP/erofs-rs
[2] https://erofs.docs.kernel.org/en/latest/roadmap.html

Thanks,
Gao Xiang