[Mesa-dev] Understanding Components of SWR

[Zielinski, Jan]

> Is there any document for extending SWR for architectures other than Intel?

Unfortunately not. SWR was not architected to be portable beyond CPUs with different levels of AVX ISAs. 

> It seems like SWR uses llvm_pipe shader creation, so is it still based on tgsi IR to LLVM conversion? 

Yes, it is still based on TGSI.

> Is there a path from NIR->LLVM (it seems so as per https://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=LLVM-Switches-To-NIR-Default ?

For SWR no - it does not exist, at least not yet. From the top of my head, I don't really know how much effort it would be to port SWR to NIR, but I do plan to look into it. At some point... 

> Is the above idea possible at high-level? or I am missing lots of important points?

The most important point you may be missing is the fact that rasterization in SWR is not based on LLVM. It based on AVX intrinsics (see code in src/gallium/drivers/swr/rasterizer/core/). This is probably the biggest problem if you target any other architecture. Most probably you would need to rewrite the rasterizer to use LLVM IR or to some kind of language that is based on LLVM and supports explicit vectorization, like ISPC. Rewriting is most probably easier than convincing the community to introduce ISPC (or any other new language) dependency to Mesa, though. ;-)

> Overall idea is to have SWR retargettable for any architecture that is supported by LLVM codege and also don't want to use TGSI instead use NIR.

Are you thinking about using SWR for Libre-SOC?

BR,
Jan

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