Timothy Arceri To Tackle RadeonSI OpenGL Shader Caching

Timothy Arceri of Collabora is close to finally merging the massive OpenGL on-disk shader cache. A majority of that work is for common Mesa but for the initial work it's just been wired into Intel's i965 Mesa driver. But, fortunately, this Collabora developer is planning to wire up the GLSL shader cache for benefiting the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.

The OpenGL shader cache has gone through several revisions and is getting its final "reviewed-by" sign-offs before landing in Mesa. It looks like Timothy's next target is RadeonSI support, which will be great. As explained previously, this can speed-up subsequent load times of games, improve playability for games that require new shaders to be compiled in-game, etc.

Earlier today was a patch from a new contributor. While it was with good intentions from someone trying to get involved with Mesa development, this patch trying to implement the shader cache for RadeonSI took an incorrect and basic approach where any benefit would be minimal.

But the good news is that Timothy Arceri just commented on the mailing list, "I'm not sure how much time you have to work on this feature, but just letting you know it was my intention to start work on shade cache support for radeonsi next week."

As the AMD Linux developers are already stretched thin for resources and Marek has previously expressed some skepticism about the shader cache benefits for RadeonSI, great to see that Arceri is planning to start working on a solution soon. Hopefully we'll see this materialize and land in time for the Mesa 17.1 release in a few months.