Nouveau NIR Support Nears The Mesa Merging Milestone

It has been a while since last having anything to report on the Nouveau Gallium3D driver's effort to support the NIR intermediate representation as part of their effort to re-use existing code-paths for helping to bring-up SPIR-V compute support for this open-source NVIDIA Linux driver and ultimately working towards Vulkan support. But the latest version of these Nouveau NIR patches are now available and almost ready to be mainlined.

Karol Herbst joined Red Hat at the end of last year to help accelerate the Nouveau driver with having been a long-time contributor to this community-oriented open-source driver. One of his first projects has been getting this Nouveau NIR support going for Red Hat's yet to be detailed SPIR-V/compute plans.

With the eighth version of these NIR patches posted today, Karol commented, "I think this is finally getting complete." But for now there are a few Piglit and conformant test suite regressions due to issues in common NIR/Gallium code and some features like OpenGL bindless textures are not yet supported along the NIR path.

This latest version of the patches has various code changes, fixes, and other clean-ups. The V8 patches can be found on Mesa-dev.

Hopefully we will see this code land for Mesa 18.2, at least disabled by default but will be able to be easily enabled via the NV50_PROG_USE_NIR environment variable. Though with these current patches landing it won't magically mean any working SPIR-V/Vulkan support, but that's a goal further out to be accomplished.