[libre-riscv-dev] NLNet Funded development of a software/hardware MESA driver for the Libre GPGPU

[Jacob Lifshay]

On Wed, Jan 8, 2020, 18:08 Hendrik Boom <hendrik at topoi.pooq.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 09, 2020 at 08:34:48AM +0800, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton
> wrote:
> > (if responding on mesa-dev please do cc me to help preserve the thread, i
> > am subscribed in digest mode, thanks)
> >
> > the NLNet funding application documented here was successful:
> > https://libre-riscv.org/nlnet_2019_amdvlk_port/
> >
> > we therefore have money (direct payment of tax free, tax deductible
> > donations from the NLNet Foundation into your bank account [1]) available
> > for anyone, anywhere in the world, to help create a 3D MESA Vulkan
> > compliant driver for a hybrid hard-soft GPU.
>
> Does it make sense for the hardware to execute Vulkan bytecode directly?
>

No it does not, SPIR-V is designed to be easy to compile, so is stored in
SSA form (basically an unlimited number of registers where each instruction
in the program assigns its results to its own separate register), along
with having large amounts of extra info that's useful for optimizations but
not really for running it directly.

Jacob