Intel OpenGL Shader Cache Revised Once More

The long ongoing work to implement an OpenGL/GLSL shader cache for the Intel Mesa driver has been revised once more with 32 new patches hitting the mailing list today.

While the Intel i965 shader cache work pre-dates the RadeonSI shader cache that has since landed, this cache has yet to get it over the finish line with it largely having stalled last year as Timothy Arceri transitioned from a Collabora developer where he worked on the Intel cache to now working for Valve and focusing on the Radeon driver stack. This summer though Jordan Justen of Intel picked up work on this shader cache.

Jordan today published his second version of the i965 shader cache work and currently sits at around 2,300 lines of new code. This on-disk shader cache is meant to help speed-up game load times and help in performance if games are reloading shaders frequently.

The shader cache in its current form is not being enabled by default but requires the MESA_GLSL_CACHE_DISABLE=0 environment variable be set.

These latest patches can be found on Mesa-dev. With the Mesa 17.3 code being branched by the end of the week, it's looking unlikely this Intel shader cache will materialize in a stable Mesa release this calendar year.