LLVM 15.0 Planning For Early September Release - Important For RDNA3 Graphics Support
LLVM 15.0 is particularly important since it contains the initial AMD GFX11/RDNA3 target support with the AMDGPU back-end. This GFX11 support is important as its required by Mesa's RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for shader compilation support and optionally used by the RADV Vulkan driver too -- but the strong preference these days is with the ACO compiler back-end for RADV, which still isn't an option for mainline RadeonSI. LLVM 15.0 has all the initial GFX11 code for that next-generation AMD graphics hardware launching later this year.
LLVM 15.0 release timing is all the more important with this release having the AMD GFX11 enablement work needed for the open-source Radeon graphics driver stack.
The second LLVM release of the year usually occurs during September, so the LLVM 15.0 release schedule isn't particularly surprising. But it's good that the penciled date is 6 September for the LLVM 15.0 release. Coming earlier in the month rather than later (assuming release goals are met), should help ensure LLVM 15.0 is picked up in time for the autumn Linux distribution releases like Ubuntu 22.10. Distributions like Fedora 37 are already planning for LLVM 15.0.
The proposed 15.0 release schedule has the branching and first release candidate at the end of July, a second release candidate toward the end of August, and the final release on/around 6 September.
In addition to all the GFX11 (RDNA3) enablement work, LLVM 15.0 also has -march=native support for the Apple M1, Clang "RandStruct" support to randomize the structure layout, faster square root instructions for AMD Zen, AmpereOne CPU support, initial SPIR-V back-end code, Sony PlayStation 5 upstreaming, initial DirectX/HLSL code, and LoongArch support beginning to appear along with many other compiler improvements and new features.
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