SPIR-V Support For LLVM Is Moving Forward

While the original SPIR intermediate representation from the Khronos Group was derived from LLVM IR, SPIR-V that's used by OpenCL 2.1+ and Vulkan is not. But there is still work underway on being able to translate from LLVM IR into SPIR-V via a new back-end.

Developer Nicholas Wilson took to the LLVM mailing list today to explain the work on his up-to-date fork of LLVM with a modernized SPIR-V LLVM back-end. Eventually the plan is to merge this back-end into LLVM, but it's not yet fully-baked.

Aside from other shortcomings, this back-end is currently only tailored to SPIR-V with OpenCL use-cases and not yet any Vulkan support but that should come eventually.

More details on this preliminary work can be found via this mailing list post while the experimental SPIR-V back-end can be found via GitHub. Work on it is progressing but it doesn't sound like it will be ready until the summer at the earliest. This will be interesting in the long run to see new innovations thanks to the vibrant LLVM community can be adapted to use this SPIR-V back-end that in turn can be consumed by modern drivers.