i965 Shader Cache Revised As It Still Might Squeeze Into Mesa 17.3

Intel's Jordan Justen has sent out his third revision to the recently renewed patches for allowing an OpenGL on-disk shader cache for the "i965" Mesa driver.

Just a few days back Jordan sent out a revised Intel shader cache implementation for this code that's long been baking on the Intel side but yet to be merged for mainline Mesa while the RadeonSI shader cache and co has been present now for many months.

This third revision to Jordan's shader cache patches carry out some code rework recommended by another Intel developer. That developer, Jason Ekstrand, also sounded optimistic that the code might still land in time for the Mesa 17.3 release. That branching of code had been set for 20 October but as of writing hasn't occurred yet to allow in some last-minute features.

There's no guarantee that this Intel OpenGL shader cache will make it in time for Mesa 17.3, but we should see within the next few days. The latest patches for now can be found via Mesa-dev.

It's important to note that this initial Intel OpenGL shader cache isn't enabled by default within Mesa but requires the environment variable MESA_GLSL_CACHE_DISABLE=0.