Initial Tessellation Shader Support For RadeonSI NIR

The RadeonSI Gallium3D driver's NIR back-end is moving one step closer to feature parity with the existing OpenGL capabilities of this AMD GCN graphics driver.

Timothy Arceri working for Valve has been focusing on the NIR back-end recently for RadeonSI. This NIR intermediate representation handling is being driven in order to add SPIR-V ingestion support to RadeonSI with code sharing for RADV's existing NIR-based infrastructure.

When using the experimental NIR support, the OpenGL support has been overcoming hurdles and one of the main blockers is now cleared. Arceri has published a set of 18 patches providing initial tessellation shader support for RadeonSI NIR.

The code isn't ready for merging quite yet but those wanting to learn more can see this patch series. It will be interesting to see the RadeonSI NIR support mature in 2018.