Nouveau NIR Support Nears The Mesa Merging Milestone

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Nouveau NIR Support Nears The Mesa Merging Milestone

It has been a while since last having anything to report on the Nouveau Gallium3D driver's effort to support the NIR intermediate representation as part of their effort to re-use existing code-paths for helping to bring-up SPIR-V compute support for this open-source NVIDIA Linux driver and ultimately working towards Vulkan support. But the latest version of these Nouveau NIR patches are now available and almost ready to be mainlined...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nouveau-NIR-V8

[creative]

If someone really spent the time with NVidia's ASM style PTX languages which are isolated versions from one generation to the next. I think something like nouveau would see a massive performance leap. Now the only problem is someone spending the time which is a ton of work, a ton! At least I would think having people people working with PTX developing drivers would lead to much faster drivers, but again each GPU architecture has different ASM style cuda languages.

I am probably behind the curve in my thinking though and they are already using it. Anyone know?

[smitty3268]

If someone really spent the time with NVidia's ASM style PTX languages which are isolated versions from one generation to the next. I think something like nouveau would see a massive performance leap. Now the only problem is someone spending the time which is a ton of work, a ton! At least I would think having people people working with PTX developing drivers would lead to much faster drivers, but again each GPU architecture has different ASM style cuda languages.

I am probably behind the curve in my thinking though and they are already using it. Anyone know?

Nouveau is slow because they can't reclock the hardware for most recent cards. Anything else compared to that is a pretty tiny effect.

[creative]

smitty3268 Seems I remember someone mentioning something like that once. Well that sounds simple enough for the reason the drivers are slow.

[starshipeleven]

smitty3268 Seems I remember someone mentioning something like that once. Well that sounds simple enough for the reason the drivers are slow.

And the reason they can't re-clock the cards is because NVIDIA does not release the power management firmware (which is loaded at runtime) to do so.

So far they just released basic card firmwares so the card can be used to display a GUI, which turns Noveau into something like a "fallback" driver until the user can install their blob. On newer cards anyway.