[Mesa-dev] Where do we put a Vulkan driver?

[Kristian Høgsberg]

On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 11:36 PM, Jose Fonseca <jfonseca at vmware.com> wrote:
> On 16/02/16 22:19, Brian Paul wrote:
>>
>> On 02/16/2016 02:41 PM, Dave Airlie wrote:
>>>
>>> On 17 February 2016 at 04:39, Jason Ekstrand <jason at jlekstrand.net>
>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> So, we just pushed a branch containing a Vulkan driver.  Naturally, we
>>>> would like to incorporate that driver into the upstream mesa tree.
>>>> While
>>>> we work on upstreaming the prerequisites in NIR and the i965 back-end
>>>> compiler, there is a question that needs answering:  Where do we put it?
>>>>
>>>> The Vulkan driver challenges the tree-like nature of the way mesa is
>>>> currently organized.  We now have two drivers that share a lot of the
>>>> same
>>>> underlying hardware-specific code (compiler and ISL) but target
>>>> different
>>>> APIs and no gallium-like middle layer to hide behind.  Obviously, we
>>>> don't
>>>> want to put a Vulkan driver in src/mesa/drivers/dri/i965.  If we start a
>>>> src/vulkan directory, we don't really want to put the shared parts into
>>>> src/vulkan/intel.  Where should we put the Intel-specific but
>>>> API-agnostic
>>>> bits?  In particular, we need a place to put ISL and the back-end
>>>> compiler.
>>>> We don't want to deal with the headaches of making a public API and
>>>> keeping
>>>> it stable, so they need to live somewhere in the mesa tree.
>>>>
>>>> In my personal opinion, the best thing to do is probably to add a
>>>> src/intel
>>>> folder with subfolders for vulkan, isl, and the back-end compiler.  The
>>>> src/mesa/drivers/dri/i965 folder would then basically be just the GL
>>>> bits
>>>> of the driver.  It does seem a little odd to have "intel" as a top-level
>>>> source folder, but I can't come up with anything better.
>>>>
>>>> Thoughts?  Opinions?  Favorite colors?
>>>
>>>
>>> I don't think we'll get this right the first time, and when we
>>> randomly decide to
>>> change it we can just make poor Emil handle the fallout. :-P
>>>
>>> Anyways,
>>>
>>> src/intel works for me, also src/shed/intel, src/shared/intel,
>>> src/drivers/intel
>>
>>
>> I like src/shared/intel/ FWIW.
>>
>> -Brian
>
>
> Me too FWIW.  We could also consider putting all non-GL/Gallium/Vulkan
> specific stuff in src/shared too, like src/util, nir, etc.

We do have a few pieces that are intel-specific that we'd want to
share with the GL driver, so I don't feel that src/shared is
necessarily the best place. I'd prefer something like
src/intel/isl, src/intel/compiler, src/intel/genxml and
src/intel/vulkan. You could say that we should put out intel compiler
backend in src/compiler/intel and perhaps the vulkan API in
src/vulkan/intel, but the other pieces are intel specific helper
libraries that don't really fit under any other umbrella.

Kristian

> But like Dave said, we can always tweak these things later.
>
> Congrats on getting 0-day Vulkan support BTW!
>
> Jose
>
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