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.