Mesa's Shader Cache Is In The Process Of Landing

Intel developers are in the process of landing their GLSL shader cache into mainline Mesa.

Carl Worth of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center landed the initial patches today for their shader cache -- storing compiled OpenGL shaders on the disk so they can be quickly reloaded in the future rather than having to be re-compiled each time. SHA1 sums are used for matching to the shader cache and ensuring no differences.

There were several patches landed today by Carl including the machinery for --enable-shader-cache but it isn't all setup just yet. Carl explained, "We don't actually have the code for the shader cache just yet, but this configure machinery puts everything in place so that the shader cache can be optionally compiled in."

Hopefully the rest of the shader caching code will land quite soon. Meanwhile the proprietary NVIDIA and AMD Linux graphics drivers have offered such a shader compiler cache for quite some time -- well, for AMD Catalyst since last year while NVIDIA added their shader disk cache back in 2011.