R600 Gallium3D LLVM Shader Compiler Hooked Up

[phoronix]

Phoronix: R600 Gallium3D LLVM Shader Compiler Hooked Up

Mainline Mesa Git can now be built with the AMD R600 Gallium3D LLVM shader compiler back-end available...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTA5MTk

[entropy]

Sounds great! I'm a "bit" confused, though.
Will this also end up as a workhorse for GLSL eventually or is meant to be OpenCL focused only?

[blacknova]

Sounds great! I'm a "bit" confused, though.
Will this also end up as a workhorse for GLSL eventually or is meant to be OpenCL focused only?

Seems like for both.
It is good to hear that open-source stack will get OpenCL support soon.

[cl333r]

Meanwhile who is compiling the shaders in Gallium?

[entropy]

Meanwhile who is compiling the shaders in Gallium?

I guess one has to be a real expert to keep track on which driver/architecture makes use of which approach to shader compilation.
Seems like there's no general approach among different Gallium drivers.

I'm lost...

[cl333r]

I guess one has to be a real expert to keep track on which driver/architecture makes use of which approach to shader compilation.
Seems like there's no general approach among different Gallium drivers.

I'm lost...

Or maybe in the meantime the shaders aren't compiled at all, maybe they're interpreted or read from punch cards.

[tstellar]

Sounds great! I'm a "bit" confused, though.
Will this also end up as a workhorse for GLSL eventually or is meant to be OpenCL focused only?

The LLVM backend will be used for OpenCL. It could potentially be used for GLSL as well, but it still needs a fair amount of work to bring it up to par with the current r600g compiler. At the moment there aren't any plans to improve GLSL support in the LLVM backend, but the work could certainly be done if an interested developer (or developers) wanted to do it.

[orome]

The LLVM backend will be used for OpenCL. It could potentially be used for GLSL as well, but it still needs a fair amount of work to bring it up to par with the current r600g compiler. At the moment there aren't any plans to improve GLSL support in the LLVM backend, but the work could certainly be done if an interested developer (or developers) wanted to do it.

Is this a feasible approach? Will LLVM bring significant improvements in any area over the current compiler?
If LLVM will be used for GPGPU compute wouldn't it make sense to have one compiler (with two front ends) instead of two?

is this technically related to the LunarGLASS project? afaik, they have GLSL to LLVM frontend

[Qaridarium]

nice but.... i do not have R600/SI hardware. r600/SI is hd6000 right ?

and also its openCL only for now and my card hd4770 is in the planet obsolescence to not get openCL support. '

[ChrisXY]

The article doesn't say it:
It needs exactly llvm 3.1. It won't compile with llvm 3.2svn either...