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

[Ian Romanick]

On 08/25/2014 06:58 PM, Rob Clark wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 22, 2014 at 11:13 AM, Connor Abbott <cwabbott0 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Importing/forking the llvm IR code with a different symbol set, and
>>> trying to not intentionally
>>> be incompatible with their llvm.
>>
>> That sounds like a huge amount of work, possibly even more work than
>> going it on our own because the LLVM project moves really quickly and
>> we'd have to import all of the changes. Also, it seems pretty ugly and
>> I'm sure distro maintainers would just looooooove a solution like that
>> /s. Just look at the situation with Chromium and Fedora now (or at
>> least last I checked).
> 
> but do the parts we want move quickly (and do we *want* them to move
> quickly)?  A fast moving dependency is not really a good thing.

I'm also not too thrilled about having to field bug reports with "you
have this bug / performance problem / whatever because you built with a
too old / too new version of LLVM."  Closed source projects avoid this
sort of problem (and the ABI issues) by just importing a blessed version
of LLVM into their project... and that seems to be the model that the
LLVM project expects.

This impedence mismatch between expected development models is
fundamentally at the core of all my issues with using LLVM in Mesa.

> BR,
> -R
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