[Libre-soc-dev] Introduction

[Jules Penuchot]

Hi Vivek,

On 3/14/21 1:49 PM, vivek pandya wrote:
> Hi Jules,
> 
> Nice to meet you!

Nice to meet you too :)

> I have been working on this experimental driver for sometime now.
> What I have been trying to do is inspired from 
> https://github.com/baldurk/visor <https://github.com/baldurk/visor> , as 
> I only work on this on weekends and I am not an expert in mesa codebase 
> or SwiftShader I am referring to simple implementations like visor.
> As this is a software rasterizer it has a GPUStatus struct to hold 
> indexBuffer and vertexBuffer , image is also stored as a pointer to 
> bytes.  Basically no hw abstraction in linux driver space to use actual 
> memory on a device , everything is on CPU memory.

I'll look into it, thanks!

> The driver is able to execute a simple DrawTriangle function which 
> executes vertex shader and fragment shader  through LLVM's ORCJit but it 
> does not generate meaningful results. Because codegeneration is not yet 
> aware about the GPUStatus struct, that is the next thing I have to do to 
> get the first triangle. Current code generation is all code copied from 
> AMD's radv driver implementation which is not a software rasterizer.
> The resterization is a bit slower but it can be improved by threads but 
> not a priority for now.
> 
> However since the driver is able to receive the Draw command that means 
> lots of vkCreate... functions are implemented to do basic stuff that is 
> required to get up to this point.
> Also I am able to run 
> https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/articles/api-without-secrets-introduction-to-vulkan-part-2.html 
> <https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/articles/api-without-secrets-introduction-to-vulkan-part-2.html> 
> that means driver is able to use image from a CPU memory and present it 
> on display with mesa's WSI layers. And hopefully that means I am on the 
> right path. Once I update codegen to use GPUStruct and get a triangle on 
> screen it should be sufficient to prove that this is the correct way.

Sounds pretty nice already!

> The codebase is in C so it's a bit painful to work with. Also I have to 
> use LLVM's C bindings to create IR an and that is very painful compared 
> to LLVM's C++ API.

Could some parts of that codebase be turned into C++? I should be able 
to help with that if you want.

> The code has lots of unused code as I started copying things from other 
> implementations, I will clean up things but not a priority.
> 
> An experienced mesa/vulkan driver engineer may not have taken this path 
> but once I get a triangle on screen I will be more confident about my 
> approach.
> 
> Hope this helps and if you dig into the codebase please feel free to 
> send email to my email address (CC list) . I will be happy to explain.

I'll dig into it this week! I might not be as active as you during the 
weekends however. I consider this work to be a good fit for my thesis so 
I'll spend time on it during weekdays.

Awesome work so far.

Regards,
Jules