Mesa 19.0 Picks Up Intel NIR Caching Patches To Help With Shader Re-Compiles

With just days to go until the Mesa 19.0 branching and feature freeze, it's a busy time on Mesa Git with developers working to land their latest changes into this next quarterly feature release.

Jason Ekstrand, the lead developer of Intel's "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver at their Open-Source Technology Center, landed a set of patches overnight around NIR caching.

With adding NIR caching support to the driver's pipeline cache, the end result of this latest work is enabling caching of pre-lowered NIR. Caching at this lower-level, Ekstrand explained, should help with faster shader recompiles happening due to state changes.

It's great to see all of this open-source Intel graphics driver activity in Mesa 19.0 with Icelake "Gen 11" graphics finally becoming a reality later this year.