Sony Begins Landing PlayStation 5 Support In The Upstream LLVM/Clang Compiler

Similar to Sony contributing PlayStation 4 compiler support in LLVM with Clang being their preferred code compiler, Sony has now begun upstreaming PlayStation 5 (PS5) support in the open-source LLVM/Clang compiler stack.

The PlayStation 5 features a custom AMD SoC making use of Zen 2 CPU cores. There has long been the Zen 2 (znver2) support within the upstream LLVM compiler while Sony's contributions are targeted on the PS5 platform support overall for targeting the combined hardware/software stack making up this game console that launched in November 2020.

Within upstream LLVM Git is the "ps5" triple added, refactoring from the PS4 toolchain class, and as of the end of last week is now the basic PS5 driver. The basics are there while it will likely see more work moving forward -- with time there has now been 300+ PS4-related commits to LLVM to date.

These upstream LLVM patches were submitted by Sony's Paul Robinson while we'll see what more PlayStation 5 compiler enablement code they'll be working to upstream in the near future. This work hitting LLVM Git will be part of the LLVM 15.0 release in the autumn.

By upstreaming their PlayStation 5 platform support it should reduce Sony's own maintenance burden for having to maintain many out-of-tree patches for their PS5 SDK and allow for more easily updating their software development kit to future LLVM/Clang releases with greater ease to enjoy new upstream features and other improvements.