Progress On SPIR-V For The Nouveau Driver Is Moving Slow

Back in July I wrote about someone working on a SPIR-V to NV50 IR Nouveau translator so that this intermediate representation for Vulkan and OpenCL 2.1+ could then be fed into this open-source NVIDIA driver. A brief, indirect update was shared this weekend and so far it appears the work is progressing slowly.

In responding to a question on an unrelated mailing list thread (it was about the latest performance counters work), Nouveau contributor Ilia Mirkin commented about the SPIR-V to NV50 IR pass.

Ilia wrote, "Pierre Moreau is working on a SPIR-V [to] nv50 ir adapter, which will hopefully mean that once a SPIR-V llvm backend exists (such a thing *is* in the plans by... someone, right?) that would be able to be used. He hasn't made a lot of progress though. Among other things, SPIR-V is SSA, and nv50 ir input has to be non-ssa (because, among other things, the various lowering passes generate non-ssa code, futz with control flow, etc)."

For the near future at least, NVIDIA card owners will likely need to rely upon NVIDIA's closed-source Vulkan driver for suitable support.