LLVMPIPE -- a fork of softpipe that employs LLVM for code generation.
Status
======
Done so far is:
- the whole fragment pipeline is code generated in a single function
- input interpolation
- depth testing
- texture sampling
- 1D/2D/3D/cube maps supported
- all texture wrap modes supported
- all texture filtering modes supported
- perhaps not all texture formats yet supported
- fragment shader TGSI translation
- same level of support as the TGSI SSE2 exec machine, with the exception
we don't fallback to TGSI interpretation when an unsupported opcode is
found, but just ignore it
- done in SoA layout
- input interpolation also code generated
- alpha testing
- blend (including logic ops)
- both in SoA and AoS layouts, but only the former used for now
- code is generic
- intermediates can be vectors of floats, ubytes, fixed point, etc, and of
any width and length
- not all operations are implemented for these types yet though
Most mesa/progs/demos/* work.
To do (probably by this order):
- code generate stipple and stencil testing
- translate TGSI control flow instructions, and all other remaining opcodes
- integrate with the draw module for VS code generation
- code generate the triangle setup and rasterization
Requirements
============
- A x86 or amd64 processor. 64bit mode is preferred.
Support for sse2 is strongly encouraged. Support for ssse3, and sse4.1 will
yield the most efficient code. The less features the CPU has the more
likely is that you ran into underperforming, buggy, or incomplete code.
See /proc/cpuinfo to know what your CPU supports.
- LLVM 2.6 (or later)
For Linux, on a recent Debian based distribution do:
aptitude install llvm-dev
For Windows download pre-built MSVC 9.0 or MinGW binaries from
http://people.freedesktop.org/~jrfonseca/llvm/ and set the LLVM environment
variable to the extracted path.
For MSVC there are two set of binaries: llvm-x.x-msvc32mt.7z and
llvm-x.x-msvc32mtd.7z .
You have to set the LLVM=/path/to/llvm-x.x-msvc32mtd env var when passing
debug=yes to scons, and LLVM=/path/to/llvm-x.x-msvc32mt when building with
debug=no. This is necessary as LLVM builds as static library so the chosen
MS CRT must match.
The version of LLVM from SVN ("2.7svn") from mid-March 2010 is pretty
stable and has some features not in version 2.6.
- scons (optional)
- udis86, http://udis86.sourceforge.net/ (optional). My personal repository
supports more opcodes which haven't been merged upstream yet:
git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/~jrfonseca/udis86
cd udis86
./autogen.sh
./configure --with-pic
make
sudo make install
Building
========
To build everything on Linux invoke scons as:
scons debug=yes statetrackers=mesa drivers=llvmpipe winsys=xlib dri=false
Alternatively, you can build it with GNU make, if you prefer, by invoking it as
make linux-llvm
but the rest of these instructions assume that scons is used.
For windows is everything the except except the winsys:
scons debug=yes statetrackers=mesa drivers=llvmpipe winsys=gdi dri=false
Using
=====
On Linux, building will create a drop-in alternative for libGL.so. To use it
set the environment variables:
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$PWD/build/linux-x86_64-debug/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
or
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$PWD/build/linux-x86-debug/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
For performance evaluation pass debug=no to scons, and use the corresponding
lib directory without the "-debug" suffix.
On Windows, building will create a drop-in alternative for opengl32.dll. To use
it put it in the same directory as the application. It can also be used by
replacing the native ICD driver, but it's quite an advanced usage, so if you
need to ask, don't even try it.
Unit testing
============
Building will also create several unit tests in
build/linux-???-debug/gallium/drivers/llvmpipe:
- lp_test_blend: blending
- lp_test_conv: SIMD vector conversion
- lp_test_format: pixel unpacking/packing
Some of this tests can output results and benchmarks to a tab-separated-file
for posterior analysis, e.g.:
build/linux-x86_64-debug/gallium/drivers/llvmpipe/lp_test_blend -o blend.tsv
Development Notes
=================
- When looking to this code by the first time start in lp_state_fs.c, and
then skim through the lp_bld_* functions called in there, and the comments
at the top of the lp_bld_*.c functions.
- The driver-independent parts of the LLVM / Gallium code are found in
src/gallium/auxiliary/gallivm/. The filenames and function prefixes
need to be renamed from "lp_bld_" to something else though.
- We use LLVM-C bindings for now. They are not documented, but follow the C++
interfaces very closely, and appear to be complete enough for code
generation. See
http://npcontemplation.blogspot.com/2008/06/secret-of-llvm-c-bindings.html
for a stand-alone example.
See the llvm-c/Core.h file for reference.
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