Intel Iris Gallium3D Driver Gets On-Disk Shader Cache Support

In helping to speed-up game load times when switching to the new Intel "Iris" Gallium3D OpenGL Linux driver and smooth out frame-rates for games sporadically loading shaders, Mesa 19.2-devel has added on-disk shader cache support for the driver.

Intel's existing "i965" classic Mesa driver has long supported an on-disk shader cache along with the other Mesa OpenGL drivers while now the Gallium3D shader cache functionality has been extended for the new Iris driver.

Wired up on Tuesday across the span of several commits was plumbing in the on-disk shader cache support to this Intel Gallium3D driver to the extent that it's now being used.

This implementation allows the caching of the NIR intermediate representation for shaders along with the compiled Assembly shaders for the GPU.

Overall the situation is looking good for Intel's plans to have this new open-source OpenGL driver ready for use by default by EOY 2019.