RadeonSI Can Begin Using Valve's ACO Compiler For Certain Shaders

[phoronix]

Phoronix: RadeonSI Can Begin Using Valve's ACO Compiler For Certain Shaders

Beginning today with the newest Mesa 23.2-devel code, the environment variable option AMD_DEBUG=useaco is now available for telling the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver to use Valve's ACO shader compiler back-end rather than the AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end for supported shader types...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/RadeonSI-Adds-Use-ACO

[tildearrow]

Yay! Competition to AMDGPU-PRO's proprietary shader compiler!

[user1]

Finally some progress! But I'm curious if it will become the default compiler for RadeonSi instead of LLVM because ACO is not developed by AMD unlike LLVM.

[mbriar]

Most exciting about this is the prospect of not having to wait for distros to update llvm to get fixes and new hardware support. This was a blocker for day one out-of-the-box support for most AMD GPU releases in the past.

[qarium]

Yay! Competition to AMDGPU-PRO's proprietary shader compiler!

i just ask because i don't know isn't the AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler not Competition to the AMDGPU-PRO's proprietary shader compiler?

or do you want to say that it is not good enough to be a competition ?

then yes i agree ACO for OpenGL could in the end finish of the AMDGPU-PRO's proprietary shader compiler...

but it also could finish of LLVM for AMD gpu hardware in general.

[user1]

Most exciting about this is the prospect of not having to wait for distros to update llvm to get fixes and new hardware support. This was a blocker for day one out-of-the-box support for most AMD GPU releases in the past.

Was this an issue even in up to date distros like Fedora or rolling release distros? I know that for Ubuntu there is the Kisak Mesa ppa which always ships up to date LLVM.

[qarium]

Most exciting about this is the prospect of not having to wait for distros to update llvm to get fixes and new hardware support. This was a blocker for day one out-of-the-box support for most AMD GPU releases in the past.

thats really nice ;-)

[mbriar]

Was this an issue even in up to date distros like Fedora or rolling release distros? I know that for Ubuntu there is the Kisak Mesa ppa which always ships up to date LLVM.

It was an issue on Arch where it shipped llvm 14 for like 2 month after the RNDA3 release, which required 15. It's not nice in general because distros are conservative with updating llvm, which sometimes leads to bug fixes not reaching users for years. Having the shader compiler as part of Mesa and updated in lock-step is much nicer.

[darkbasic]

I can't believe it took that long, but it's finally happening!

[agd5f]

Yay! Competition to AMDGPU-PRO's proprietary shader compiler!

Not sure what you are referring to. LLVM is open source.