<snip>
3. NIR vs. TGSI
---------------
It is *not* a goal for this project to use NIR for normal GLSL shaders.
We'll keep the TGSI backend at least for now. But it makes sense to
think ahead.
A minor disadvantage of NIR is that the GLSL-to-NIR path is not as solid
as the GLSL-to-TGSI path yet, but this shouldn't be too difficult to
overcome.
The major disadvantage of NIR is that it doesn't have serialization.
radeonsi uses the fact that TGSI *is* a serialization format for two
things:
- The internal shader cache, which avoids re-compiling the same shader
over and over again when it's linked into different programs. (This part
only needs a strong hash.)
- The (disk) shader cache stores the TGSI so that it's available in case
additional shader variants need to be compiled on the fly.
Some ideas:
1. Add a serialization format for NIR. This is the most straight-forward
solution, but it's a lot of work for a comparatively small feature.
This would simplify the i965 cache fallback path a lot. I *think* it
also solves the blocking issue (or at least the major one) with a vc4
(and a guess freedreno) on-disk shader cache.
<snip>
_______________________________________________
mesa-dev mailing list
mesa-dev@lists.freedesktop.org
https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/mesa-dev
