Radeon R600 Back-End Merged Into LLVM

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Radeon R600 Back-End Merged Into LLVM

After being in development for the past year, AMD's Radeon R600 LLVM back-end has been merged into the upstream LLVM code-base...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTI1MTI

[Marc Driftmeyer]

``It took a while of pushing?''

It took months of Tom getting phenomenal free advice on architecture and development which provided a dramatically improved code base that now meets all the criteria required to get this back-end into LLVM proper. That's what it took.

Kudos to Tom and all his hard work and kudos to all the main players in LLVM/Clang who took the time to help out and we all get a better code base.

[orzel]

On one hand, LLVM 3.2 will be released soon and current(git) mesa requires it.
On the other hand, i suppose LLVM 3.2 is already feature-frozen.

So I think the question is quite legitimate and the information would belong to a complete news/article!

[agd5f]

On one hand, LLVM 3.2 will be released soon and current(git) mesa requires it.
On the other hand, i suppose LLVM 3.2 is already feature-frozen.

So I think the question is quite legitimate and the information would belong to a complete news/article!

It will be in 3.3.

[smitty3268]

``It took a while of pushing?''

It took months of Tom getting phenomenal free advice on architecture and development which provided a dramatically improved code base that now meets all the criteria required to get this back-end into LLVM proper. That's what it took.

Kudos to Tom and all his hard work and kudos to all the main players in LLVM/Clang who took the time to help out and we all get a better code base.

Heh, it also took weeks where he asked for anyone to do a final review of the code so it could get merged, and no one stepping up. But it's in now, so all is good.

[Veerappan]

Follow-up question: Does this mean that the R600 LLVM-backend instance that's living in the Mesa tree will be removed in the near-ish future? I'd hate to see them diverge too much.

[89c51]

Will nouveau have to write their own llvm backend in order to get OpenCl support also??


Props to Tom.

[agd5f]

Will nouveau have to write their own llvm backend in order to get OpenCl support also??


Props to Tom.

I think they currently convert LLVM into TGSI and then use their existing shader compiler.

[agd5f]

Follow-up question: Does this mean that the R600 LLVM-backend instance that's living in the Mesa tree will be removed in the near-ish future? I'd hate to see them diverge too much.

I believe the current plan is to maintain a separate LLVM 3.2 tree with the R600 backend for the next mesa release (taking care to port fixes to both LLVM trees), then switch to upstream LLVM once the R600 backend is available in a stable LLVM release.