Radeon LLVM Code Generation Improvements Being Worked On

It's been a while since last having any major breakthroughs to talk about for the open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver stack, but steady work continues. Some recent Mesa commits to Git highlight some code generation improvements.

Tom Stellard, the open-source AMD Linux developer largely focused on AMD's GPU LLVM back-end and their overall OpenCL/compute push, made some improvements to the Radeon Gallium3D code for enhancing code generation. Tom's change to Radeon Gallium3D now makes use of LLVM's instruction combining pass, "This should improve code quality in general and will help with some future changes to how we emit kill instructions."

He followed-up with a patch for improving code generation for the KILL_IF instruction.

There are some regressions in the number of generated instructions, but overall the Radeon open-source driver stack as a whole continues moving forward for bettering the AMD Linux hardware support -- sans still waiting on the new AMDGPU kernel driver that's now too late for Linux 4.1.