Nouveau NIR Support Slated To Land In Mesa 19.1 Over The Days Ahead

The work done by Red Hat's Karol Herbst over the past year for plumbing in NIR intermediate representation support within the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" Gallium3D driver will finally be landing.

Karol Herbst sent out the latest 34 patches while sharing his intentions to go ahead and merge the code to Mesa over the next few days. This means the experimental Nouveau NIR support would be part of next quarter's Mesa 19.1 release.

The NIR support is considered experimental at this time and not enabled by default but can be easily toggled with the NV50_PROG_USE_NIR=1 environment variable.

Ultimately this NIR work is about bringing up Nouveau's OpenCL/compute support but may prove useful in the future around Vulkan, potentially performance benefits, and the trend of more Mesa/Gallium3D drivers turning to supporting this IR as an alternative to the likes of Gallium's TGSI.