Mesa's Shader Disk Cache Now Enabled By Default

With the recent roll-out of Mesa's on-disk shader cache, an initial limitation was that the entire cache would be erased if a user switched between 32-bit and 64-bit applications. That's now been fixed. And now the OpenGL GLSL shader cache is enabled by default.

Timothy Arceri landed the patch today in Mesa Git that's been floating on the Mesa mailing list the past few days for supporting multiple architectures. Mesa's disk cache code will now play happily between 32-bit and 64-bit applications/games without flushing the entire cache. The work landed with this commit.

This is an important milestone since this issue is also what was blocking the RadeonSI shader cache to be enabled by default. Now that it works properly when switching between 32-bit and 64-bit programs, hopefully it will be turned on by default soon. See yesterday's RadeonSI's Mesa Shader Cache Can Be A Big Help To Modern Linux Games for benchmark results.

Update: Timothy Arceri has now enabled the cache by default. This allows for more widespread testing and ahead of the Mesa 17.1 release they will decide whether to keep it on-by-default for the actual release.