Where We At

The blogging is happening once again, and it feels good.

I did a brief recap a couple posts ago, but I’ve gotten some sleep since then, and now it’s time for the real deal. Here’s what you missed while you were asleep and not following the Mesa RSS feed like all the coolest people I know:

• zink-wip is shrinking. no, really. it’s down from close to 600 patches to around 200 after the past month
• descriptor caching has landed, likely yielding around an 80-100% performance increase across the board for applications which were CPU-bound. huge, huge thanks to legendary reviewer, RADV developer, and all around great guy, Bas Nieuwenhuizen for tackling this way-too-fucking-big, 50+ patch MR in an amazingly short amount of time
• no, zink still can’t render glxgears properly
• zink now has lavapipe-based CI jobs going to prevent regressions!
• Erik Faye-Lund has managed a one-liner MR that fixed over a hundred unit tests in CI
• buffer invalidation is in, which lets zink avoid stalling the GPU in a lot of cases, also improving performance
• with all this said, another giant thanks to l*v*pipe guru and part-time motivational graphics coach, Dave Airlie, who has reviewed nearly 200 of my patches in this release cycle
• lavapipe is ramping up towards Vulkan 1.1 support, which will, other than being a great milestone and feat of software engineering, enable zink CI testing through GL 4.5
• less than a hundred patches to go before zink’s threaded context support is up for merging

Good times.