Mesa Turns To BLAKE3 For Faster Vulkan Shader Hashing

Mesa has switched from SHA1 to BLAKE3 for its shader hashing to deliver better performance.

Mesa has relied upon SHA1 for hashing of Vulkan shaders to uniquely identify them for the purposes of caching and other factors. But given the increasing size of Vulkan shaders, switching to a faster hashing algorithm can be beneficial.

Mesa developers decided to switch to BLAKE3, which is derived from BLAKE2 and Bao. The three year old hashing function is extremely fast and can also handle parallelism.

This merge request that landed this morning into Mesa 23.2-devel shifts the Vulkan shader module hashing from SHA1 to BLAKE3.