Intel's Preparing To Push Its New GLSL Compiler Into Mesa

Written by Michael Larabel in Mesa on 22 July 2010 at 11:07 AM EDT. 4 Comments
MESA
Mesa 7.9 is shaping up to be one hell of a release. Mesa 7.9 is already set to carry many ATI Gallium3D driver improvements along with enhancements to the LLVMpipe driver that uses the CPU for rendering, the early R600g driver, various Gallium3D architectural and state tracker improvements (MSAA, Stream Out, etc), more OpenGL 3.x functionality, and tons of other changes. But there's still more coming! Intel's Ian Romanick has announced on the Mesa development list that they would like to merge their new GLSL compiler into Mesa in August.

For a few months now, Intel has been writing a new GLSL compiler for Mesa (they've dubbed it "GLSL2") that started out as a standalone GL Shading Language compiler that was then integrated into Mesa. Over the past month they now have better code being generated and they have written a complete linker that's nearly complete.

Intel's new GLSL compiler for Mesa isn't yet complete, but they want it in Mesa as part of their Intel 2010'Q3 driver package, which means that it needs to be merged into Mesa's mainline code-base and Mesa 7.9 then released before the end of the quarter.

Romanick is hoping to merge all of this code into Mesa by the end of August. Merging will take place as soon as the compiler is effectively complete and there are no piglit regressions and that the failing tests do not crash.

Intel has plans for this GLSL compiler to properly handle GLSL ES (GLSL for embedded systems) too, but that isn't yet complete and will likely come later.

Intel hasn't tested their new GLSL compiler with any other drivers besides their own Intel classic Mesa driver. They're hoping for the best that this new compiler will work well with the other drivers, including the classic ATI Radeon drivers and the assortment of Gallium3D drivers from Nouveau to LLVMpipe and Softpipe. The other drivers will hopefully work fine and not regress, but in particular the R300 GLSL compiler improvements that are being worked on this summer by a student developer participating in Google's Summer of Code, may differ.

Ian ends his mailing list message with, "We're already very close to our proposed merge criteria."
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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