Zink driver startup time squashed with new patches

Developer Mike Blumenkrantz is once again blogging about working on the Zink driver, and this time a nice optimization is on the way for startup times.

As a brief refresher on Zink from the Mesa documentation: "The Zink driver is a Gallium driver that emits Vulkan API calls instead of targeting a specific GPU architecture. This can be used to get full desktop OpenGL support on devices that only support Vulkan.".

One problem that has been encountered recently was slow startup times, specifically some testing has been done against a GTK4 demo. In the blog post, Blumenkrantz notes how on the Iris driver (Intel) the average startup time for the gtk4-demo was "between 190-200ms" but on Zink it was between "350-370ms".

After profiling and getting some patches made to move more of the work into more threads, they've been able to reduce the startup time to an average of around "average of 260-280ms, a 25% improvement". Nice.

This isn't the end though, Blumenkrantz said investigation is ongoing and hopefully they will get it closer to the startup times on Iris.

Overall it might not sound like a huge amount when talking milliseconds, but every bit counts and getting apps and games to startup quickly is obviously a nice improvement overall.