[Mesa-dev] i965 NIR linking

[Eduardo Lima Mitev]

On 09/13/2017 01:37 AM, Timothy Arceri wrote:
> This started out based off the work Jason did back in 2015 to add
> NIR linking to the Intel VK driver. It needed a reasonable amount
> of updates to work with the GL driver, tess, xfb, etc.
> 
> As per the results in patch 8, it can provide some nice
> improvements despite the GLSL IR linker already doing the same
> link time removal of unused varyings.
> 
> Ultimately I'd like to use this with radv but adding it to i965
> first provides a good test platform given the mature test suites,
> and extensive shader-db collections available for OpenGL. I'm
> planning on also adding a NIR packing pass and it makes sense
> to test that here also. I beleive the packing pass should be the
> last set towards removing any dependency on the GLSL IR
> optimisation passes.
> 
> Please review.
> 

Hi Timothy,

Apart from the comments I left in some patches, series is

Reviewed-by: Eduardo Lima Mitev <elima at igalia.com>

Thank you for bringing up this series. This is interesting ground work
looking into support for ARB_gl_spirv on i965. We are still analyzing
different approaches, and one option is having "SPIR-V -> NIR -> BRW",
doing linkage in NIR. Related to that, I have a couple questions:

Do you plan to continue working on improving on this (tackling the open
points you mention)? If so, do you have a roadmap?

Have you thoughts already on potential issues to implement a fully
capable NIR linker (e.g, one that would avoid any use of the GLSL linker)?.

Thanks!

Eduardo