Precompiled Cycles kernels make up a considerable fraction of the total size of
Blender builds nowadays. As we add more features and support for more
architectures, this will only continue to increase.
However, since these kernels tend to be quite compressible, we can save a lot
of storage by storing them in compressed form and decompressing the required
kernel(s) during loading.
By using Zstandard compression with a high level, we can get decent compression
ratios (~5x for the current kernels) while keeping decompression time low
(about 30ms in the worse case in my tests). And since we already require zstd
for Blender, this doesn't introduce a new dependency.
While the main improvement is to the size of the extracted Blender installation
(which is reduced by ~400-500MB currently), this also shrinks the download on
Windows, since .zip's deflate compression is less effective. It doesn't help on
Linux since we're already using .tar.xz there, but the smaller installed size
is still a good thing.
See #123522 for initial discussion.
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/123557
4bde68cdd6