[Mesa-dev] [RFC PATCH 00/16] A new IR for Mesa

[Jason Ekstrand]

On Thu, Aug 21, 2014 at 7:36 PM, Dave Airlie <airlied at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 21 August 2014 19:10, Henri Verbeet <hverbeet at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 21 August 2014 04:56, Michel Dänzer <michel at daenzer.net> wrote:
> >> On 21.08.2014 04:29, Henri Verbeet wrote:
> >>> For whatever it's worth, I have been avoiding radeonsi in part because
> >>> of the LLVM dependency. Some of the other issues already mentioned
> >>> aside, I also think it makes it just painful to do bisects over
> >>> moderate/longer periods of time.
> >>
> >> More painful, sure, but not too bad IME. In particular, if you know the
> >> regression is in Mesa, you can always use a stable release of LLVM for
> >> the bisect. You only need to change the --with-llvm-prefix= parameter to
> >> Mesa's configure for that. Of course, it could still be mildly painful
> >> if you need to go so far back that the current stable LLVM release
> >> wasn't supported yet. But how often does that happen? Very rarely for
> me.
> >>
> > Sure, it's not impossible, but is that really the kind of process you
> > want users to go through when bisecting a regression? Perhaps throw in
> > building 32-bit versions of both Mesa and LLVM on 64-bit as well if
> > they want to run 32-bit applications.
> >
> >> Without LLVM, I'm not sure there would be a driver you could avoid. :)
> >>
> > R600g didn't really exist either, and that one seems to have worked
> > out fine. I think in a large part because of work done by Jerome and
> > Dave in the early days, but regardless. From what I've seen from SI, I
> > don't think radeonsi needed to be a separate driver to start with, and
> > while its ISA is certainly different from R600-Cayman, it doesn't
> > particularly strike me as much harder to work with.
> >
> > Back to the more immediate topic though, I think think that on
> > occasion the discussion is framed as "Is there any reason using LLVM
> > IR wouldn't work?", while it would perhaps be more appropriate to
> > think of as "Would using LLVM IR provide enough advantages to justify
> > adding a LLVM dependency to core Mesa?".
>
> Could we use an llvm compatible IR? is also a question I'd like to see
> answered.
>

What do you mean by llvm compatible?  Do you mean forking their IR inside
mesa or just something that's easy to translate back and forth?

--Jason Ekstrand
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