Valve Hires X11 Veteran Keith Packard To Work On The Linux Display Stack

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Valve Hires X11 Veteran Keith Packard To Work On The Linux Display Stack

Valve's latest high-profile hire is adding Keith Packard to their roster of Linux graphics driver developers...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Valve-Hires-Keith-Packard

[yoshi314]

i think that means that either valve is committed to linux, or the steambox project is still going strong, despite appearing a bit stagnant.

i personally feel it's the latter, linux improvements just happen to be a nice side effect of their effort.

[bachchain]

Shader compiler performance people especially wanted.

Bit late to the party, aren't they

[jaxxed]

Bit late to the party, aren't they

because of vulkan&compute or because shader-compilers are already good?

[nomadewolf]

because of vulkan&compute or because shader-compilers are already good?

Why not both?

[Azpegath]

Awesome! I love that Valve sees a problem and takes care of it themselves. You have an itch? Scratch it! Valve has the resources to really affect the development in a positive direction.

[theriddick]

I'm not surprised that Valve is trying to make Linux the backup OS for them in the future given some of the things happening with windows lately. 'It really is a great platform when supported'

[jaxxed]

I was thinking that if the answer was (A), then KP could be asked to work on shader implementations in compute (converting existing shaders to SPIRV code, or some such thing.) Valve has products on many levels.

[bachchain]

I was thinking specifically of the shader cache that was added two weeks ago. Besides that, are there really any significant improvements that can be made.

[geearf]

I was thinking specifically of the shader cache that was added two weeks ago. Besides that, are there really any significant improvements that can be made.

Well yes, shader cache is only a workaround (a nice one but still).
As for improvements you already saw with Marek threading the shader compilation and I'm sure we'll see more in the future.
I believe Vadim's backend for r600g is still faster at compiling shaders than radeonsi's one. If so you have a bench of what to attain for now.