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

[Connor Abbott]

On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 4:34 PM, Thomas Helland
<thomashelland90 at gmail.com> wrote:
> While I haven't heard about those projects, there's also GlassyMesa.
> Greg from LunarG (CC'd) posted about this to the mailing list. [1]
> However it looks like the github activity has stopped,
> and there's no new info on the projects website since its announcement.
>
> While it's not exactly the same as we're describing here,
> maybe he can share some on their experiences?
> Status of the project? Performance numbers?
> Packaging issues, ABI stability, etc?
>
> FWIW, I would prefer a world without LLVM,
> as long as there's not a big performance per man-hour
> benefit compared to rolling our own solution.
> LLVM brings extra complexity to debugging and bisecting,
> and if we want help from the users to bisect bugs it
> should be as easy as absolutely possible.

Before this discussion I think Matt, Ken, and Ian (the main compiler
people still at Intel) had the same view which is why I started on
NIR, but we'll see if someone can make an LLVM-based prototype that
can change their minds. I guess I would be convinced if someone could
make a backend for TGSI or i965 fs that won't be too hard to optimize
in order to not produce extra MOV's, since I still think handling IR's
like those with swizzles and writemasks is going to be painful with
LLVM. Personally, I think the work to get something working with LLVM
won't be much more than the work needed to get NIR to do what we need,
since the optimizations we do need that LLVM would provide are either
straightforward or well-described by a paper that we can pretty much
follow directly, but we'll see - I'm not as sure about that.

>
> [1] http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/2014-June/060951.html
>
>
> 2014-08-26 19:59 GMT+02:00 Matt Turner <mattst88 at gmail.com>:
>> On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 9:00 AM, Jose Fonseca <jfonseca at vmware.com> wrote:
>>> If LLVM was a useless piece of junk, we wouldn't have any trouble adding it
>>> as a dependency, as we would be the sole user.  But precisely because LLVM
>>> is successful in so many use cases, hence several packages depend on it, we
>>> shouldn't depend, so we can avoid the dealing with the oh-so-hard dependency
>>> issue!?  I find it ridiculous: it's precisely because LLVM is potentially
>>> that good that it makes sense for us/distros/everybody to put up with the
>>> dependencies issues it may bring, and worth considering.
>>
>> It sounds like there are enough people in the Mesa community that are
>> familiar with LLVM and interested in using it in the GLSL compiler
>> that there would be someone willing to start working on it. Hopefully
>> that's the case.
>>
>> I tried going through the LLVM language frontend tutorial on LLVM.org
>> and only had to get to chapter 4 (the first two chapters don't use
>> LLVM) before the code didn't compile (and I couldn't figure out why)
>> with LLVM 3.4 on my system. I found this [1] tiny example (not updated
>> for 2 years) using the C API and thought it'd probably not work
>> either, but was happily surprised that it compiled and worked fine. I
>> see that the C API is used in radeonsi and gallivm in Mesa.
>>
>> Here's what I think would be compelling: Using the stable C API,
>> translate from GLSL IR into LLVM IR. Call LLVM's optimizations. Give
>> backends the option to consume LLVM IR. From here we can evaluate just
>> how significant the improvement from LLVM's optimizer is. At least two
>> people have written GLSL IR -> LLVM translators in the past -- Luca
>> Barbieri (what ever happened to him?!) and Vincent Lejeune (Cc'd).
>> Their code is [2] and [3]. I think this plan would also fit nicely
>> with existing LLVM backends, potentially avoiding a trip through TGSI.
>>
>> I think this is strictly superior to other ideas like throwing out the
>> GLSL frontend and translating LLVM IR back "up" to the higher level
>> GLSL IR.
>>
>> So, maybe some people experienced with LLVM from VMware and AMD are
>> interested in taking the lead?
>>
>> [1] https://github.com/wickedchicken/llvm-c-example
>> [2] http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~anholt/mesa/log/?h=llvm-4 (Eric's
>> branch based on Luca's code)
>> [3] http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~vlj/mesa/ (one of the glsl-to-llvm* branches)
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