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

[Jose Fonseca]

If point-releases don't give enough control, lets have Mesa maintain its fork of LLVM, call it something completely different, like "mesa compiler toolchain", to make it clear to distribution packagers that this fork of LLVM has extra GPU goodness and, might not give the expected results for other uses, like compiling the linux kernel.

We'd still merge from upstream LLVM whenever convenient, so it's not a permanent fork.  Just something we control within Mesa community.


So it's unnecessary to write our own compiler toolchain from scratch just to have control over the release/distribution aspects.


This might be worth considering regardless whatever Intel decides to do regarding Mesa's IR,if the point releases aren't flexible enough for the needs of radeonsi etc.

Jose


________________________________________
From: mesa-dev <mesa-dev-bounces at lists.freedesktop.org> on behalf of Marek Olšák <maraeo at gmail.com>
Sent: 30 August 2014 12:07
To: Ian Romanick
Cc: Greg Fischer; mesa-dev at lists.freedesktop.org
Subject: Re: [Mesa-dev] [RFC PATCH 00/16] A new IR for Mesa

On Thu, Aug 28, 2014 at 12:07 AM, Ian Romanick <idr at freedesktop.org> wrote:
> On 08/27/2014 02:55 PM, Marek Olšák wrote:
>> Our plan is to always require the latest released version of LLVM
>> because of new features in our LLVM backend that the radeonsi driver
>> depends on to advertise all GL features. Some new features listed for
>> the radeonsi driver in Mesa release notes are only enabled if you have
>> latest LLVM from git/svn.
>
> I think this underscores the fundamental problem have having such a
> critical, core piece of project infrastructure being completely out of
> the control of the project.  For me, trying to ship a product on which
> people rely, this is an absolute non-starter.
>
> At least with the other components on which Mesa relies (e.g., libdrm,
> 2D drivers, etc.) it's largely the same group of people with the same
> set of goals.

With us doing LLVM point releases, we could squeeze new features into
them if we need the features in Mesa *now*. I think this happened with
geometry shaders for radeonsi and it's probably going to happen more
often. So it's not so out of control.

Marek
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