Someone Is Already Working On SPIR-V For The Nouveau Driver

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Someone Is Already Working On SPIR-V For The Nouveau Driver

While there is already an Intel Vulkan Linux graphics driver developed by Valve and LunarG that will be open-sourced as soon as the Vulkan specification is officially out, we haven't heard much about the other open-source Linux graphics drivers trying to get a jump start on Vulkan / SPIR-V support...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nouveau-SPIR-V-Translate

[blackout23]

"This is a step on the back-end needed for going from the Vulkan/OpenCL 2.1+ intermediate representation over to the hardware instructions of the older "NV50" class GPUs. "

So these are Geforce 8 -> GTX 200 series. They don't even support OpenGL 4.3 or OpenGL ES 3.1 which will be the minimum requirement for Vulkan. Still could be useful for compute if someone really wants compute on these older cards.

I'm already feeling quite limited with my GTX 580 because it only has 1.5 GB VRAM, which means no Ethereum mining or large neural network on this card.

[souenzzo]

"This is a step on the back-end needed for going from the Vulkan/OpenCL 2.1+ intermediate representation over to the hardware instructions of the older "NV50" class GPUs. "

So these are Geforce 8 -> GTX 200 series. They don't even support OpenGL 4.3 or OpenGL ES 3.1 which will be the minimum requirement for Vulkan. Still could be useful for compute if someone really wants compute on these older cards.

I'm already feeling quite limited with my GTX 580 because it only has 1.5 GB VRAM, which means no Ethereum mining or large neural network on this card.

Make OpenCL/Vulkan implementation is 'simpler' then OpenGL.
Once we get OpenCL/Vulkan working, we can do a (one) video driver over vulkan for all video cards

[duby229]

Make OpenCL/Vulkan implementation is 'simpler' then OpenGL.
Once we get OpenCL/Vulkan working, we can do a (one) video driver over vulkan for all video cards

Yep, that's my understanding too. That's where the SPIR-V - LLVM-IR translation will come in real handy. Nouveau can use that pretty easily I'd think, so could radeonsi

[dragorth]

Ok, but Vulkan has a minimum HARDWARE level that must be met. And these cards don't support that level. Now, this work should enable OpenCL over these cards, as well as allow the cards that do support the hardware features required by Vulkan to utilize this as a base for their own use, but this doesn't magically enable Vulkan on unsupported cards.

[Ancurio]

Ok, but Vulkan has a minimum HARDWARE level that must be met. And these cards don't support that level. Now, this work should enable OpenCL over these cards, as well as allow the cards that do support the hardware features required by Vulkan to utilize this as a base for their own use, but this doesn't magically enable Vulkan on unsupported cards.

Yep. Since the original email was asking about Cuda support, this is every much in the context of Compute API support with little regard for Vulkan. Maybe it will become relevant if Khronos decides to publish an extension allowing OpenGL to consume SPIR-V.

[SXX⁣]

That's where the SPIR-V - LLVM-IR translation will come in real handy. Nouveau can use that pretty easily I'd think, so could radeonsi

How exactly is that useful for Nouveau that doesn't use LLVM?