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

[Michel Dänzer]

On 21.08.2014 04:29, Henri Verbeet wrote:
> On 20 August 2014 20:13, Kenneth Graunke <kenneth at whitecape.org> wrote:
>> I've also heard stories from friends of mine who use radeonsi that they couldn't get new GL features or compiler fixes unless they upgrade both Mesa /and/ LLVM, and that LLVM was usually either not released or not available in their distribution for a few months.
>>
> 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.


> I'm sure AMD carefully considered the tradeoff, and that it's worth it for them, but purely as a
> user/downstream I'd say using LLVM for the radeonsi compiler was a mistake.

Without LLVM, I'm not sure there would be a driver you could avoid. :)


-- 
Earthling Michel Dänzer            |                  http://www.amd.com
Libre software enthusiast          |                Mesa and X developer