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

[Marek Olšák]

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