[Mesa-dev] [PATCH v2 00/15] i965: Rework uniform handling in the back-end

[Matt Turner]

On Tue, Mar 22, 2016 at 3:33 PM, Jason Ekstrand <jason at jlekstrand.net> wrote:
> This is mostly a re-send of a patch series I've had floating around in one
> form or a while for quite some time.  It's basically the same except that
> the original version was missing a work-around for Sandy Bridge.  For a
> while, I wasn't really pushing to get it merged because I couldn't
> demonstrate any actual performance benifit from pushing arrays.  However,
> with the Vulkan API, the concept of push constants is directly exposed to
> the user and we really need to be able to indirect on them.  This series
> makes the FS backend 100% ready for indirect push constants;  vec4 will
> take a little more work.
>
> It's worth noting that we've been carying these patches around in our
> Vulkan driver for probably 3 or 4 months now and it's working great.
>
> For those that prefer to review on a branch:
>
> https://cgit.freedesktop.org/~jekstrand/mesa/log/?h=review/i965-uniforms
>
> I think Kristian has mostly reviewed these patches.  However, he never sent
> any R-Bs to the list.  I'd also like Ken or Matt to look at it from a
> design perspective.

I don't know what I think. I'm sympathetic to Curro's argument, but in
the absence of more data it's hard to judge anything really. I'm not
at all sympathetic to

"""
Do I have a proof-of-concept in code, no.  However, I've run through
it in my head and I have a pretty good idea what it would look like.
You are free to go off and do it if you don't believe me, but I don't
really want to hold things up while you do.
"""

That's what... An Appeal to Your Brain? :)

I don't know how to proceed on that front if no one is willing or
interested in trying to implement it using reladdr.

I ran shader-db.

total instructions in shared programs: 7113290 -> 7161760 (0.68%)
instructions in affected programs: 866011 -> 914481 (5.60%)
helped: 0
HURT: 7180

total cycles in shared programs: 64705926 -> 64776118 (0.11%)
cycles in affected programs: 4951554 -> 5021746 (1.42%)
helped: 1605
HURT: 5204

of which the overwhelming majority is vertex shaders (why? this series
is i965/fs). FS changes are just

instructions in affected programs: 13550 -> 14132 (4.30%)
helped: 0
HURT: 50

but I'm having a hard time finding shaders that actually use the
address register.

What's going on with the shader-db regressions?