RadeonSI Gallium3D In Mesa 19.1 Enables Parallel Shader Compile Support

Marek Olšák of AMD kicked off the new month by finally landing support for the ARB/KHR extensions around parallel shader compile support.

Back in February he posted the RadeonSI patches for implementing KHR_parallel_shader_compile and ARB_parallel_shader_compile extensions including the necessary work to core Mesa and Gallium3D. It's that work that has now been merged to Mesa Git.

These parallel shader compile extensions offer support for applications/engines to provide a hint to the driver about the maximum number of CPU threads it would request for compiling shaders and also a means of querying if the shader compilation process has finished. KHR_parallel_shader_compile is part of OpenGL 4.6.

Over the course of dozens of lines of code added, the patches are now in place for core Mesa/Gallium3D and with Mesa 19.1 RadeonSI is the first Mesa OpenGL driver supporting these extensions. Outside of Mesa, the NVIDIA proprietary driver stack has long been supporting these extensions.