AMD's Plans For ARB_gl_spirv Support In RadeonSI

Back in May we talked about ARB_gl_spirv / NIR Support Being Worked On For RadeonSI while now we have more details from AMD's Nicolai Hähnle regarding these plans.

Nicolai has written a blog post to share an outline for his plans on supporting ARB_gl_spirv and being able to re-use the SPIR-V/NIR code-paths within RadeonSI, which right now are used by the RADV Vulkan driver.

For going from SPIR-V to LLVM IR for the AMDGPU stack, he's planning on making use of some RADV code. But there's still plumbing in the main Mesa code that needs to be done as well for SPIR-V support. He's planning to re-use the GLSL linker for making this happen.

Those interested in more details on his plans can read this blog post.

The OpenGL ARB_gl_spirv extension is what allows a SPIR-V module to be used by OpenGL and for modifying GLSL to be a source language for creating SPIR-V modules. SPIR-V, of course, being the IR used by Vulkan and OpenCL 2.1+.