R600 Gallium3D To End Code Sharing With RadeonSI Driver

Written by Michael Larabel in Radeon on 14 September 2017 at 09:19 AM EDT. 18 Comments
RADEON
While the R600g and RadeonSI drivers are two distinct Gallium3D drivers for R600 (HD 2000) through Northern Islands (HD 6000) and GCN and newer, respectively, they have up until now shared some code via gallium/radeon. But that will now be ending.

Marek Olšák is ending the code sharing between R600 and RadeonSI with the R600g driver now importing its own current state of the previously-shared Radeon Gallium code. This is common code pertaining to Gallium3D pipe setup, video decoding, command submission, and other items that could be shared between R600g and RadeonSI.

This results in roughly 15k more lines of code in Mesa now that the previously-shared code is being duplicated within R600g. Marek has the huge patch here.

Marek simply noted in the mailing list post, "This marks the end of code sharing between r600 and radeonsi. A lot of functions had to be renamed to prevent linker conflicts. There are also minor cleanups."

He didn't elaborate on his reasoning for ending this code sharing, but presumably is being done with less and less of a focus being put on the R600g driver while changing the common code could risk regressing this older pre-GCN AMD graphics hardware support and less testing taking place there. There's also the future and with RadeonSI continuing to be used by very latest Vega GPUs and presumably next year's Navi GPUs too, the code base will further end up diverging as things move forward, so now is the time to split it up.
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