More Of Valve's RADV Optimizations Around Fast-Linking Reach Mesa 23.1

The work on the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" around fast-linking with the graphics pipeline library (GPL) extension continues as the Linux graphics driver developers at Valve continue making remarkable progress.

Last week Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve's Linux graphics team wrote about the RADV work on the graphics pipeline library and the efforts carired out by him, Samuel Pitoiset, and other Valve pipe-fitters to ideally avoid shader pre-caching while encountering no in-game stuttering. The hope is that this RADV graphics pipeline library support may be in good enough shape for the Mesa 23.1 release next quarter to enable by default where as now it requires the "RADV_PERFTEST=gpl" environment variable.

While much progress was made on the RADV GPL code last week, as of that earlier article not all of the work had been upstreamed yet. Fortunately, in the past few days more of that has reached Mesa 23.1-devel upstream. Samuel's work to skip shader cache for fast-linked pipelines with GPL, pipeline compilation clean-ups, minor optimizations for GPL fast-linking, and other code has reached upstream. It's great seeing the fast-paced work on RADV GPL!

Mike Blumenkrantz also published a new blog post highlighting further work on the graphics pipeline library fast-linking. Not only has this been for RADV, but there has been work done on the Lavapipe software driver that it now has "the fastest GPL linking in the world." Those interested can read his latest post on GPL fast-linking here.