Etnaviv Gallium3D Lands Async Shader Compilation With ARB_parallel_shader_compile

For those interested in the Etnaviv Gallium3D driver that provides reverse-engineered, open-source OpenGL support for Vivante graphics IP its newest feature is supporting GLSL asynchronous shader compilation.

The Etnaviv driver continues to be improved upon for enhancing the open-source GPU driver support for the Purism Librem 5 and various other devices/SoCs relying on this Vivante graphics IP. For Mesa 22.2 the newest feature to mark off the TODO list for Etnaviv is ARB_parallel_shader_compile.

ARB_parallel_shader_compile is the OpenGL extension allowing for hints around the number of CPU threads an application/game wants to be used for shader compilation and basically better handling of shader compilation in parallel.

Christian Gmeiner who leads the development of the Etnaviv effort added this ARB_parallel_shader_compile support that was merged this week to Mesa 22.2 and now joins the likes of RadeonSI, Intel Iris, and Freedreno supporting this parallel shader compile extension.