Metalink supports listing multiple partial and full file hashes along with PGP signatures.

Besides FTP and HTTP mirror locations and rsync, it also supports listing the P2P methods BitTorrent, ed2k, magnet link or any other that uses a URI.

It was designed to aid in downloading Linux ISO images and other large files on release day, when servers would be overloaded (each server would have to be tried manually) and to repair large downloads by replacing only the parts with errors instead of fully re-downloading them.

It was initially adopted by download managers, and was used by open source projects such as OpenOffice.org and Linux distributions.

A community developed around it, more download programs supported it (including proprietary ones) and it saw commercial adoption.

In 2008, the community took their work to the Internet Engineering Task Force which resulted in Metalink 4.0 in 2010, described in a Standards Track RFC.

Dofus, a Flash MMORPG uses Metalinks for downloads and so does SageMath, the open-source mathematical software.