The Mesa On-Disk Shader Cache Has Been Revised Again (V5)

Timothy Arceri of Collabora has revised his massive patch-set that implements an on-disk shader cache for the Intel open-source driver.

This on-disk shader cache is intended to speed-up game load times by not having to recompile shaders so often by caching them to the hard disk, and is similar to the on-disk shader caches of the proprietary NVIDIA and AMD OpenGL drivers. This on-disk shader cache should help shader-heavy games with Shadow of Mordor being one of the Linux games to be really helped out by this patch series, according to Arceri.

With this fifth version of this on-disk shader cache, it now supports caching shaders making use of transform feedback. Aside from that change, all 88 patches have been re-based against the last three months of Mesa changes -- the last time this patch series was touched.

Unfortunately, it's not yet clear when this on-disk shader cache will be merged into Mesa. Initially at least will be limited to just the i965 Mesa driver but will hopefully be extended in time to the other drivers. More details on the patches via this patch series.