Gallium Nine Lands Threaded Context Support, Other Improvements

Several improvements were merged on Friday to Mesa's Gallium3D Nine state tracker that allows for an alternative means of Direct3D 9 support within Wine.

Mike Blumenkrantz who is known for his work on the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation within Mesa was responsible for Friday's Gallium Nine improvements that are now part of the Mesa 21.3 code-base.

Most notable is support for threaded contexts. The threaded context support in Nine should help with performance for cases where the game/application is CPU bound.

There was also another merge with various small optimizations focused on the CSMT overhead (Command Stream Multi-Threading). That work included some optimizations around texture binds and other small tweaks.

Mesa 21.3 should debut in November as the next feature release for this collection of open-source Linux graphics components.