Red Hat's Latest Nouveau Developer Posts Updated NIR Code

Not only is RadeonSI working on NIR support but Red Hat has begun working on NIR support for the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver as part of a compute effort and possible Vulkan support in the future.

As written about last month, longtime Nouveau contributor Karol Herbst has joined Red Hat and his first public-facing project is developing NIR support for Nouveau. In the original patch series Karol explained he's working on NIR support for Nouveau in order to get SPIR-V (the Vulkan / OpenCL IR) support moving. Their expressed focus right now is on SPIR-V compute support but this would also be a step towards Vulkan for this open-source, reverse-engineered NVIDIA Linux graphics driver.

With these latest NIR patches, Karol has wired in support for geometry, tessellation and compute shaders. Additionally, he's implemented other remaining intrinsics and operations. There are also 64-bit type fixes and the ability to use the NV50_PROG_USE_NIR=1 environment variable for enabling this NIR code-path for NVC0 Gallium3D on non-debug Mesa builds.

Herbst is hoping others will now begin testing this Nouveau NIR support with various Linux games and workloads in looking for other bugs or shortcomings. More details on Mesa-dev.