On 1/8/19 9:57 PM, Kenneth Graunke wrote: > On Tuesday, December 4, 2018 10:26:43 AM PST Karol Herbst wrote: >> the naming is a bit confusing no matter how you look at it. Within SPIR-V >> "global" memory is memory accessible from all threads. glsl "global" memory >> normally refers to shader thread private memory declared at global scope. As >> we already use "shared" for memory shared across all thrads of a work group >> the solution where everybody could be happy with is to rename "global" to >> "private" and use "global" later for memory usually stored within system >> accessible memory (be it VRAM or system RAM if keeping SVM in mind). >> glsl "local" memory is memory only accessible within a function, while SPIR-V >> "local" memory is memory accessible within the same workgroup. >> >> v2: rename local to function as well >> >> Signed-off-by: Karol Herbst <kher...@redhat.com> > > I strongly dislike this patch, and I think we ought to revert it. > > This probably makes sense from an OpenCL memory-model view of the world, > but it's really confusing from a compiler or general programming point > of view. > > /Everybody/ knows what a local variable is. It's one of the most used > concepts in programming. Calling it nir_var_function is very confusing. > The variable is a...function? Maybe it's a function pointer? Neither > of those things even exist in GLSL, so...what the heck is it? > > Renaming global scope variables to "private" is also confusing IMO. > They're certainly not private to a function. They're globally > accessible by anything in the whole shader. I'll admit "global" isn't > a great name either.
It seems like the concepts we're after a function local and thread local, so why not nir_var_thread_local (for old nir_var_global) and nir_var_function_local (for old nir_var_local). When "global" is reintroduced to mean thread global, we could add it as nir_var_thread_global. That seems to match at least one reasonable view of a storage hierarchy. > I think we need to discuss this more. There are people with large > series of outstanding work that now have to rebase on this flag day > rename, and I don't think two people is enough consensus for renaming > a core IR concept. Can we find names we're all happy with? > > --Ken
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