Mesa's On-Disk Shader Cache Revised For The 7th Time

Timothy Arceri of Collabora has now revised the massive patch-set implementing an on-disk shader cache for Mesa with the work nearing completion, at least for the Intel i965 driver.

The latest work to this Mesa shader cache is support for SSO, improvements to the code in re-basing it against the latest work, fallback support for programs using FragData bindings, and other clean-ups and improvements.

This on-disk shader cache, which is similar to the cache implemented by most proprietary OpenGL drivers, allows for speeding up games by caching their compiled shaders on-disk. This Mesa shader cache is known to especially help modern Linux game ports like Shadow of Mordor as well as Unreal Engine 4 titles. But for now this shader cache in Mesa will work only with the Intel driver until it's been wired up by the Gallium3D drivers, etc.

These V7 patches for the Mesa shader cache can be found on Mesa-dev but hopefully we'll see it in master soon enough, it's been a long time coming.