Intel's Lionel Landwerlin has seen his patch series under review for the past month land into Mesa 24.2. This reduces the time by about 50% that it takes for vkCreateDevice(), the call for creating a new device instance with the Vulkan API.
This significant speed-up to the Intel ANV start-up time comes from making more of the device initialization asynchronous. Plus other code optimizations during the initialization process leads to this ~50% reduction in start-up time.
Details for those interested via this merge request that is now in Mesa Git for the Mesa 24.2 release due out in August.