R300 Gallium3D Driver Finally Wired Up For On-Disk Shader Cache

Continuing on from the story a few days ago about R300 Gallium3D seeing a big performance fix after being regressed in recent years, another potential bonus is in store.

Potentially helping out performance or at least smoothing out frame-rates is a tentative patch wiring up Mesa's on-disk GLSL shader cache to the R300g driver. The GLSL shader cache is shared among the Mesa drivers so it actually took just a few dozen lines of code extending it to R300g. But with no upstream Mesa developers actively advancing R300g, this shader cache functionality hadn't come until an independent contributor stepped up to the plate.

There's now this patch pending allowing for GLSL shaders to be cached on-disk for this open-source ATI/AMD driver for R300 through R500 series hardware. At least in the initial post, unfortunately, no performance numbers were shared for how it helps these vintage graphics cards through the Radeon X1000 series. But if the patch is suitable to upstream developers we could see it merged for Mesa 19.2.