Intel ANV Vulkan Driver Patches For Cross-Stage Link Optimizations

Jason Ekstrand has sent out a set of 21 patches this weekend for their "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver to support cross-stage optimizations.

This code also reuses some of the i965 OpenGL driver's cross-stage NIR linking code and makes other improvements to their pipeline code.

There aren't solid benchmark numbers yet for this cross-stage optimization code but it appears to help at least one Vulkan demo with around a two percent performance improvement.

More details via this patch series. Great to see Intel's continued Vulkan driver optimizations with every bit counting, especially recently with many patches having been coming through for an assortment of micro-optimizations. It will be interesting to see where ANV is at by the Mesa 18.0 release early next year.