zstd significantly reduces cluster compression time.
It provides better compression performance maintaining
the same level of the compression ratio in comparison with
zlib, which, at the moment, is the only compression
method available.

The performance test results:
Test compresses and decompresses qemu qcow2 image with just
installed rhel-7.6 guest.
Image cluster size: 64K. Image on disk size: 2.2G

The test was conducted with brd disk to reduce the influence
of disk subsystem to the test results.
The results is given in seconds.

compress cmd:
  time ./qemu-img convert -O qcow2 -c -o compression_type=[zlib|zstd]
                  src.img [zlib|zstd]_compressed.img
decompress cmd
  time ./qemu-img convert -O qcow2
                  [zlib|zstd]_compressed.img uncompressed.img

           compression               decompression
         zlib       zstd           zlib         zstd
------------------------------------------------------------
real     65.5       16.3 (-75 %)    1.9          1.6 (-16 %)
user     65.0       15.8            5.3          2.5
sys       3.3        0.2            2.0          2.0

Both ZLIB and ZSTD gave the same compression ratio: 1.57
compressed image size in both cases: 1.4G

Signed-off-by: Denis Plotnikov <dplotnikov@virtuozzo.com>
QAPI part:
Acked-by: Markus Armbruster <armbru@redhat.com>
Message-Id: <20200507082521.29210-4-dplotnikov@virtuozzo.com>
Signed-off-by: Max Reitz <mreitz@redhat.com>