An On-Disk Shader Cache Revised For Intel's Mesa Driver

[phoronix]

Phoronix: An On-Disk Shader Cache Revised For Intel's Mesa Driver

Timothy Arceri of Collabora has been restoring work on an on-disk shader cache for Intel's open-source Mesa OpenGL driver that was originally started by some of the Intel OTC driver developers...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Intel-Mesa-Shader-Cache-New

[Azpegath]

I reaaaaally want this for RadeonSI..

[stqn]

Typo: "Various other Intel Linux GPU drivers", I believe "Intel" shouldn’t be there.

[jrch2k8]

I reaaaaally want this for RadeonSI..

note on-disk cache reduced load time not stuter, memory cache resolve stuter at the expense of load time(the latter is already in mesa-git and is awesome)

[pal666]

note on-disk cache reduced load time not stuter, memory cache resolve stuter at the expense of load time(the latter is already in mesa-git and is awesome)

disk will be cached in memory anyway

[Guest]

How does it handle cached files aging? Do cached files expire after a certain period or do they stay there forever (or till manually deleted)?

[karolherbst]

note on-disk cache reduced load time not stuter, memory cache resolve stuter at the expense of load time(the latter is already in mesa-git and is awesome)

false and false.

on disc cache just remove the need to compile shaders. When games add and compile/link new shaders mid-game and not in loading screens it does indeed reduce stutters as long as the cache lookup is cheaper than the compile/linking.

memory cache just removes unneeded compiles in the first place, because part of older compiles can be reused later again and I don't see how that increases load time except when storing this stuff is expensive, but then something is wrong (and is also only done for radeon or something). A smart compiler backend, doesn't need something like this anyway, because it is the part of being smart.

[GreatEmerald]

That's nice. Though what's going on with GL_ARB_enhanced_layouts specified vec4-slot component numbers?

[tarceri]

How does it handle cached files aging? Do cached files expire after a certain period or do they stay there forever (or till manually deleted)?

The Mesa version string is used to decide if the cached file was created with the same Mesa version if it wasn't the file will be removed before creating a new one.

Also you can set a max cache size. If the cache is getting near the limit a file will be deleted at random before a new one is created.

[valeriodean]

That's nice. Though what's going on with GL_ARB_enhanced_layouts specified vec4-slot component numbers?

I was thinking the same question. :-)
Timothy, any news about the last piece of enhanced layouts? ^_^