NVK Vulkan Driver Starting Work On New Compiler

The NVK open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver that was started earlier this year and has been progressing nicely the past few months is starting to see work now on its own shader compiler where as up to this point has been relying on existing Nouveau Mesa code for code generation.

Jason Ekstrand of Collabora has been among the developers spending much time on the NVK driver this year. He shared yesterday that he's begun work on the compiler portion of the NVK driver to ultimately replace their use of the existing Nouveau code generation. This NIR compiler has been dubbed the "NVIDIA Awesome Kompiler" or "NAK" for short.

Interestingly with this new compiler for the NVK Vulkan driver the plan is to write most of it within the Rust programming language.

Today, I'm finally starting on compiler piece of NVK. Up until now, we've been using the old nouveau codegen. We're jokingly (but it'll probably stick) calling it the NVIDIA Awesome Kompiler or NAK for short. Stick around for more updates as the weeks go by! pic.twitter.com/kj7pTlooo6

— Jason Ekstrand 💔🇺🇦 (@gfxstrand) November 7, 2022

It will be interesting to see how this NVK work pans out over the coming weeks/months. Equally important is the work on the DRM kernel driver side for supporting the NVIDIA GSP in Nouveau or otherwise, since a shiny new Vulkan driver will be rather useless if the modern NVIDIA GPUs cannot successfully re-clock to their rated speeds in order to deliver capable performance on the open-source driver stack.