Mesa 24.3 Finishes The Years Long Effort To Phase Out The Old GLSL IR Linker

Timothy Arceri with the Valve Linux graphics team has merged the code for Mesa GLSL to convert to NIR at compile-time and in turn dropping the old GLSL IR linker with this being a multi-year effort now wrapped up for Mesa 24.3.

This finishes up work for going straight to the modern NIR intermediate representation at compile-time and does away with the old GLSL IR linker code in favor of a fully-NIR-based linker.

Arceri explained in the merge request merged this morning for Q4's Mesa 24.3 release:

"This is the final MR after years of work by many people to get us to this point. This series moves glsl_to_nir() to compile time and replaces the remaining bits of the GLSL IR linker with a fully nir based linker.

The result here is a cleaner code-base that current mesa devs can better work with, support into the future and better understand. It also sets us up for other possible improvements such as improving the glsl shader cache to finally support storing compiled shaders and not just linked shaders."

Kudos to all those involved in this lengthy effort to help better modernize the Mesa code and further focus around NIR.

This final merge request touched more than two thousand lines of code. This work and a lot of other graphics driver changes can be found in Mesa 24.3 that should be seeing its stable release around November.