RadeonSI Lands Another OpenGL 4.6 Extension, SISCHED For DriConf

Written by Michael Larabel in Mesa on 2 August 2017 at 06:12 AM EDT. Add A Comment
MESA
It's always wonderful waking up to some hearty commits in Mesa Git and this morning was one of those days.

Open-source AMD developer Nicolai Hähnle landed a number of the patches he's been working on recently and there are two big features in Mesa 17.3-devel Git this morning: ARB_transform_feedback_overflow_query and the prep work so SISCHED can be a DRI configuration option.

First up was ARB_transform_feedback_overflow_query being flipped on, which is notable since this is one of the newly required extensions for OpenGL 4.6. Intel already had this support while RadeonSI is now the first Gallium3D driver supporting it. ARB_transform_feedback_overflow_query is a means of being able to detect overflows of transform feedback buffers.

This now leads ARB_gl_spirv / ARB_gl_spirv_extensions, ARB_polygon_offset_clamp, ARB_texture_filter_anisotropic, and KHR_no_error as what's left before RadeonSI will be in compliance with OpenGL 4.6. Of those extensions left, the SPIR-V support is the big one that might still take some time while the other extensions will likely all be in place before you know it.

Then the other exciting Mesa Git work so far today was several patches prepping for sisched as a driconf option. SISCHED being the experimental "Southern Islands Scheduler" for AMDGPU LLVM that up to now had to be toggled manually via R600_DEBUG=sisched with this scheduler providing benefits to some games. Now that the plumbing is in place so it can be toggled via driconf, we could soon be seeing per-game white-listing via driconf for SISCHED similar to what we have been seeing take place with the glthread white-listing and other per-game work-arounds in Mesa.

The prep work involved for the sisched driconf support more broadly included introducing support for driver-specific driconf options, so we could be seeing more configuration tunables introduced there in the future.
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