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

[theghost]

Nice, finally some progress. Hopefully RadeonSi will get it too.

[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)?

There is no reason for compiled shaders to age, but they do indeed get invalidated. Invalidation is generally done after driver gets updated.
While I haven't glanced over new patches just yet, I remember looking at "placeholder" code with mesa cache about year ago and it seemed like it was just ready to hash shader source code and bind it with GLSL version and hardware it's supposed to run at.

NVIDIA cleans up shaders it cannot use (e.g. across driver updates), but I can't see shaders taking up much space either way.

[tarceri]

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

I had been waiting for some more feedback on my approach. At this stage it looks like I will need to make some changed and push the component packing down to the driver backend rather than trying to do it in the glsl compiler frontend. The advantages should be simpler mesa code and better output produced by the shader compiler, it should also put in place the steps for improving some of our other packing code too which currently produces sub-optimal output.

I'm about to take a couple of weeks leave so its very unlikely this will be done before the next Mesa release.

[valeriodean]

I had been waiting for some more feedback on my approach. At this stage it looks like I will need to make some changed and push the component packing down to the driver backend rather than trying to do it in the glsl compiler frontend. The advantages should be simpler mesa code and better output produced by the shader compiler, it should also put in place the steps for improving some of our other packing code too which currently produces sub-optimal output.

I'm about to take a couple of weeks leave so its very unlikely this will be done before the next Mesa release.

Understood, thanks. Enjoy your holiday! :-)