A Proposal For Compiling Direct3D HLSL With LLVM

[phoronix]

Phoronix: A Proposal For Compiling Direct3D HLSL With LLVM

Lately we have been talking a lot about this year's Google Summer of Code whereby Google pays student developers to work on various free software projects over the summer. While GSoC has been taking place for several years, this year there's been several interesting proposals expressed. Among the proposals to catch our attention has been experimental work on KDE's KWin for Wayland, an OpenGL 4.1 Gallium3D state tracker that's now turned into a video acceleration state tracker for WebM/VP8 on VDPAU, better multi-GPU support, and ReactOS improvements, among many other expressed proposals from dozens of free software projects. Another one was just brought up by a student developer and that's to provide support for compiling Microsoft Direct3D HLSL in LLVM...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=OTI2NA

[przemoli]

how it can interest Wine crew.

It is designed to create bytecode that can be consumed only by DX 3D. It won't even take HLSL itself, but rather will need something that will translate HLSL into LLVM IR first.

So wine should be interested in:

Something very instersting to wine translating HSLS -> LLVM IR -> Linux graphic drivers.

Not:

HLSL translator the same as above -> LLVM IR -> this project of GSoC -> DX 3D

What I'm missing?

[przemoli]

BTW:
Is Apple GLSL -> LLVM IR code open source?

[aussiebear]

Will there be any potential legal concerns with this idea?

[przemoli]

Will there be any potential legal concerns with this idea?

Yes if MS patented some wired translation techniques. But generally they where all invented long time ago. And you can always use alternative algorithms if MS would clime rights to those used.

And this project do not aim at executing ANY commands on gpu, so hwd patents are not a thread.

[V!NCENT]

BTW:
Is Apple GLSL -> LLVM IR code open source?

I highly doubt that. Apple open sources:
-Darwin (kernel);
-Some side projects intended for FreeBSD (LLVM, Grand Central Dispatch);

This HLSL -> LLVM code is highly likely in the graphics part of the OS design and thus it is not in Darwin itself (which is also not realy Free Software). (check the Mac OS X architecture)

[smitty3268]

Yes if MS patented some wired translation techniques. But generally they where all invented long time ago. And you can always use alternative algorithms if MS would clime rights to those used.

And this project do not aim at executing ANY commands on gpu, so hwd patents are not a thread.

Well, it seems like with the last project putting D3D into Mesa, the Wine devs said that they couldn't use that code just because the developer looked at some MS documentation on their bytecode format (i think thats what it was), not because they thought it was patented or anything but just because they had a strict policy. So now this project is talking about generating that bytecode, so it's fair to ask if they are reverse-engineering the whole thing, or are there any potential IP issues, or what the situation is.