More AMD Radeon "Navi" Code Continues Landing In LLVM For Its Compiler Backend

While we haven't yet spotted any of the other AMD Radeon "Navi" next-generation GPU support in the other software components making up AMD's open-source Linux graphics driver stack, there continues to be a lot of work happening on the AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end within the mainline LLVM code-base. In fact, there's been over eleven thousand lines of new code so far pertaining to Navi/GFX10.

As I wrote last week, AMD has begun landing Navi/GFX1010 support code into LLVM with this compiler code being the crucial piece needed for OpenGL shader compilation as well as Vulkan and connected into other areas of the stack. They haven't yet begun posting the patches for the AMDGPU kernel driver or Mesa software components nor the likes of their AMDVLK Vulkan driver, but the LLVM support is obviously a crucial first step.

Since last week's article, the code has continued to flow with "GFX1010" tags. There's been about 17 code drops / patches so far pertaining to these changes ahead of the Navi launch expected in Q3. Counting up the code changes so far, while building off the existing "GCN" AMDGPU code, the Navi/GFX1010 changes so far have introduced 11,600 lines new code while (re)moving 3,450 lines of code but keep in mind some of that is test coverage, etc.

The 11k+ lines of code addition isn't so much in the grand scheme (e.g. Vega 20 changes were much less), but good to see that count rising as we become increasingly excited to learn about AMD's next-gen GPU offering that will launch in the months ahead.

This GFX1010 LLVM code is queuing into Git/SVN for the LLVM 9.0 release that is due out around September. Our hope is also seeing the Navi code all squared away for Linux 5.3 and Mesa 19.2 as the other key components so we can see good open-source Navi support in released form by the end of the summer -- granted by launch day at least we expect all the code to be available at least in Git form for those eager to build their own kernel/Mesa/LLVM components or otherwise enjoy Radeon Software for Linux / AMDGPU-PRO for easy binary access.