Mesa 23.1 RADV Change Leads To ~60% Smaller Single File Disk Cache

For those making use of Mesa's single-file on-disk shader cache, with the upcoming Mesa 23.1 release there will be increased space savings with the Radeon Vulkan (RADV) driver.

Daniel Schürmann has landed his set of patches that re-implement the RADV pipeline cache on the common Vulkan pipeline cache code.

With this reworked Vulkan pipeline cache for the Mesa RADV driver, the single-file disk-cache is reduced by around 60% in size. The multi-file disk cache meanwhile is about 2% larger due to the overhead from additional small files.

But for those like Steam Deck gamers and others relying on the RADV single file cache, this is some nice space savings. All the details within this merge request.

Overall Mesa 23.1 is shaping up to be a very exciting quarterly update for this open-source Linux graphics stack, especially for AMD Radeon Linux customers.