[libre-riscv-dev] Kazan status

[Jacob Lifshay]

On Thu, Jun 11, 2020, 12:42 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl at lkcl.net>
wrote:

> On Thursday, June 11, 2020, Yehowshua <yimmanuel3 at gatech.edu> wrote:
>
> > >
> > > a full half of that first EUR 50,000 budget was allocated to
> > > Kazan.
> >
> > On the note of Kazan, what is currently being done there?
>
>
> nothing for the moment as we need all hands that have some nmigen
> experience on the POWER9 core.
>

I'm taking a break on Kazan as stated above, Kazan's current status is that
the SPIR-V to shader-compiler-ir translator and creating shader-compiler-ir
is somewhere around half complete, I've been writing both of those together
to allow rapid modifications to shader-compiler-ir to add support for
SPIR-V features as I encounter them in the process of writing the
translator. At that point, writing the shader-compiler-ir language
reference docs will be the next step, since many of the invariants that the
code follows is not really documented yet. Once shader-compiler-ir is
stable and documented, it will be much more practical to have multiple
people work on different parts of the compiler at the same time, since the
basic interface will not change as much. After that, writing a reference
interpreter will allow us to run some actual shaders, writing the SIMT to
vector translator (the vectorization pass) will be enough to get to where
we should be able to run shaders with the expected execution model and
allow us to have all the parts for a working interpreted shader stack.
Next, writing the shader-compiler-ir to LLVM IR translator and JIT
compiler, creating a trait for a generic shader compiler backend (the part
that translates the final shader-compiler-ir to machine code and allows
executing the JIT compiled code or an interpreter) will allow us to have a
MVP working shader compiler, as well as settling the interface between the
rest of the Vulkan driver and the shader compiler crates.

>
>
> > I contacted Anton from Embox, he worked on the Etna-viv drivers
> > and he recently joined the mailing list.
> >
> > Anton, don’t be shy to say hi :)
>
>
> hi anton, great to know you're around, we have a budget for 3D driver work
> if you're interested?
>

Hi anton, glad to have additional people around who know a lot about 3D
drivers.

Jacob