Initial SPIR-V Backend Code Lands In LLVM 15

The long in-development work by Intel, The Khronos Group, and other organizations on a proper SPIR-V back-end for LLVM is finally seeing code in mainline. As of last night the initial pieces have landed for the LLVM SPIR-V back-end for this Khronos open standard IR used most notably by Vulkan but for OpenCL and OpenGL as well.

Last night the stubbed out back-end was merged for SPIR-V into LLVM Git, which will be part of LLVM 15.0 this autumn. Following that initial code drop were the five other commits making the back-end actually functional.

It's finally happening!

As of the latest patch merged for the SPIR-V back-end, things start working, "...It is essential for minimum SPIR-V output. Also it adds several simplest tests to show that the target basically works."

There still is more SPIR-V back-end code to be mainlined, but great to see the initial code having successfully landed and hopefully by the time of LLVM 15.0 branching later this summer it will prove to be at least viable for some use-cases.

SPIR-V is at the heart of standards/software and with a mainline LLVM back-end can ultimately open it up to even more.

The Khronos Group continues hosting this Git repository where the LLVM back-end work continues to flow in for this exciting effort to allow SPIR-V binaries to be generated by LLVM. In turn with LLVM's diverse ecosystem and many different front-ends once this back-end is mature it could allow for some innovative uses for targeting Vulkan/OpenCL, etc. At this point for the Intel engineers involved their focus has been for compute support.