Valve Is Sponsoring More CI Testing For The Open-Source Radeon Linux Graphics Driver

As good news not only to future Steam Deck users but all Linux gamers making use of the Mesa open-source graphics drivers, Valve is sponsoring additional continuous integration (CI) testing of Mesa commits.

Charlie Turner of Igalia shared the news today with an MR setting up more dEQP runners. The dEQP is the drawElements Quality Program that is already used by Mesa CI for testing with both Vulkan, EGL, OpenGL ES, and OpenGL APIs. This has been very useful for Mesa's CI testing for ensuring problematic commits don't reach mainline Mesa for regressing OpenGL/Vulkan graphics API behavior.

This series proposes to add more dEQP bare-metal runners, sponsored by Valve. For now the runners are conditioned on a selection of users (similar to how freedreno's restricted traces work), since there are not enough machines to hit the runtime targets required for inclusion in the automatic pre-merge pipelines. There's nothing secret about the test loads, the restriction is purely practical for now and any interested user may request access to the runners.

A follow-up series will add trace testing runners to the CI, using a similar approach to the above.

As with most projects and efforts, Mesa's CI testing has been limited by the number of hardware systems they have devoted to being able to timely test new Mesa merge requests / patches right away without holding up the queue of patches to be tested before mainlining. Valve's sponsorship will hopefully help out moving forward in catching more issues before they are otherwise spotted.

Understandably given Valve's focus with Steam Deck featuring Radeon graphics and most of their open-source driver developers having been focused on RADV Vulkan work, their new CI bare metal runners are all Radeon based. There is additional coverage now features Kabini, Stoney, Polaris, Vega, Renoir, Navi, and Navi 2 systems.