New Patches Significantly Reduce Zink Driver Startup Time

Given a two year old bug against Mesa around slow initialization/start-up time for GTK4 on Intel graphics, prolific Zink developer Mike Blumenkrantz recently took to optimizing Zink's start-up time for this generic OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver implementation.

He began his trek with the Intel Iris Gallium3D driver taking 190~200 ms for starting the GTK4 demo application while the Zink average start-up time was 350~370 ms... Long story short after a lot of profiling and work with 17 patches, he's lowered the Zink start-up time by about 25% to now the GTK4 demo application taking around 260~280 ms as the time to first frame.

Mike Blumenkrantz continues pursuing efforts to see if he can meet (or beat) the Iris start-up times. Those interested in all the details can see Mike's blog post. The pending code to speed-up start times by moving most shader/program initialization to a thread can be found via this merge request with Mike summing it up as "this significantly improves app startup times."