Fun Friday For RadeonSI: Laying 64-Bit Integers, ARB_query_buffer_object

For those looking to live on the edge of Mesa development, there are some new patch series out this morning, particularly of interest if you are using the AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for GCN GPUs.

First off AMD's Nicolai Hähnle sent out the patches laying the foundation for 64-bit integer support in Gallium3D. This work is based on the original work done by David Airlie. This work lays out the 64-bit integer support for TGSI (the Gallium3D IR) and the Gallium3D drivers. Beyond adding the new opcodes and types for 64-bit ints, support is wired up for Softpipe, LLVMpipe, and then the RadeonSI driver for 64-bit integers.

However, this work ultimately won't be too beneficial until Intel's Ian Romanick lands his patches for exposing the GL_ARB_gpu_shader_int64 extension inside Mesa. But Nicolai is hoping to land these patches soon before that ARB_gpu_shader_int64 support even lands in Mesa.

Nicolai followed that int64 patch series with ARB_query_buffer_object for RadeonSI. The ARB_query_buffer_object for RadeonSI depends upon having the 64-bit integer support as a prerequisite. ARB_query_buffer_object is one of the few extensions still blocking RadeonSI from having OpenGL 4.4 support.

Plus there's been the usual slew of other Mesa-dev patches as well as AMDGPU DRM patches on amd-gfx to make it as an exciting time as ever for riding the bleeding-edge open-source graphics driver code.