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

[Ilia Mirkin]

On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 2:26 PM, John Kessenich <johnk at lunarg.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> If Mesa used an LLVM IR for it's shader compiler stack, it would most likely
>
> Pick a specific shipped version.  Shipped versions are stable and
> unchanging.  Upgrading to a newer version would be done only by choice, on
> Mesa's schedule.
> Not bring the source into mesa: it works perfectly well sitting next to
> Mesa.
> Link it in statically so there are no distro/versioning issues and no
> interactions with other components of the system that independently use LLVM
> however they wish.  This is also quite small compared to other uses of LLVM
> people sometimes discuss.
>
> Externally, no one could even tell some helper functions within the compiler
> stack came from LLVM or a specific version of LLVM.

So... what happens when some backend, say radeonsi, requires a newer
version? That would become linked to moving the rest of mesa up to a
newer version, or linking in 2 different versions of llvm (not sure if
that'd be possible...)

  -ilia