Intel Graphics Compiler Can Now Be Built For RISC-V

The Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) that is used on Windows as a shader compiler back-end and both for Windows/Linux as part of their OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero compute stack can now be compiled for RISC-V 64-bit.

Should you be interested in using an Intel graphics card on a RISC-V 64-bit system it's now possible to do so while compiling a working IGC compiler for use with OpenCL and Level Zero compute workloads. As previously reported on Phoronix there's been other work in the open-source Intel graphics driver stack to make it more portable for non-x86_64 platforms since the advent of Intel discrete graphics cards. For example with the modern Xe kernel graphics driver it's written to avoid x86'isms of the former i915 kernel driver so that it can be built for the likes of 64-bit ARM (AArch64) and 64-bit RISC-V for using Intel Arc Graphics and other Intel discrete GPUs on such servers.

With today's IGC 1.0.17537.20 release it doesn't provide any concise overview but when digging through all the patches making up this new Intel Graphics Compiler release, 64-bit RISC-V support is among the changes.

The necessary CMake build system adaptations are in place to allow successfully compiling IGC for RISCV64 Linux hosts. IGC was previously adapted for ARM and MIPS support to complement the central x86/x86_64 focus.