Etnaviv Strips Out Its TGSI Backend In Favor Of NIR

Mesa's NIR bandwagon continues moving around with the Etnaviv Gallium3D driver now being the latest to outright remove its Gallium3D TGSI back-end in favor of going purely with NIR for its driver intermediate representation.

Etnaviv is the reverse-engineered, open-source OpenGL driver for Vivante graphics IP. For a few years now Etnaviv has been working on a NIR compiler. Last year Etnaviv switched over to NIR by default over TGSI, the long-standing default IR of Gallium3D.

Now like the other major drivers, Etnaviv is doing a pure play on NIR. Etnaviv lead developer Christian Gmeiner this week dropped the TGSI support.

With its removal for Mesa 22.1 it frees up over 2.5k lines of code. Gmeiner commented with its removal, "I think it is time to switch to NIR per default and forget about the past. There might be stuff that will explode in different ways now but thats all fixable."