Nouveau NIR Support Appears Almost Baked, NV50 Support Added

Karol Herbst at Red Hat started off this week by publishing his latest patches around Nouveau NIR support as part of the company's effort for getting SPIR-V/compute support up and running on this open-source NVIDIA driver.

Red Hat's grand vision around open-source GPGPU compute still isn't entirely clear especially with Nouveau re-clocking not being suitable for delivering high performance at this point, but it must be grand given the number of developers they have working on improving the Linux GPU compute stack at the moment.

Karol on Monday submitted his sixth revision to the patches for adding support to the Nouveau Gallium3D code for supporting the NIR intermediate representation. With this latest patch set, the Piglit pass rate has improved, there is now NV50 support for NIR, and a variety of fixes. Support for OpenGL bindless textures though and multi-sample images are two of the features yet to be implemented.

It does look like this work is winding down on NIR support, so hopefully we will see it soon in Mesa Git well in time for Mesa 18.1. When it does land, the risk for normal users is low since this NIR code-path is hidden behind the NV50_PROG_USE_NIR=1 environment variable for the time being. The 34 patches can be found for now on Mesa-dev.

Jerome Glisse of Red Hat meanwhile has posted his latest HMM patches (Heterogeneous Memory Management) of mostly fixes for this kernel feature of relevance to GPU compute.