Nouveau's NIR Support Inches Closer To TGSI Quality

Longtime Nouveau contributor Karol Herbst joined Red Hat at the end of last year where his current task is on NIR intermediate representation support for Nouveau as part of bringing SPIR-V compute support to this open-source NVIDIA Linux driver.

Karol has spent a lot of time the past few weeks on improving the Nouveau NIR support in working towards modern compute support. This NIR support will also be useful for Nouveau hoping to have a basic Vulkan driver this year.

This week the German Nouveau developer published the fifth revision to these patches. With them he notes that the Nouveau NIR quality is closer to that of TGSI, the default Gallium3D IR currently used by NVC0, as judged by the pass rates of the conformance test suites (CTS) and Piglit unit tests.

The V5 patches have some fixes and other improvements over the prior code. At this stage the Nouveau NIR support is just about 3,500 lines of new code for Mesa. Hopefully this code will soon be ready for Mesa master and it will be interesting to see what's worked on next for compute/Vulkan by Red Hat's growing Nouveau team.