25 Jun 2017 10:03pm GMT

SPIR-V is the binary shader code representation used by Vulkan, and GL_ARB_gl_spirv is a recent extension that allows it to be used for OpenGL as well. Over the last weeks, I've been exploring how to add support for it in radeonsi.

As a bit of background, here's an overview of the various relevant shader representations that Mesa knows about. There are some others for really old legacy OpenGL features, but we don't care about those. On the left, you see the SPIR-V to LLVM IR path used by radv for Vulkan. On the right is the path from GLSL to LLVM IR, plus a mention of the conversion from GLSL IR to NIR that some other drivers are using (i965, freedreno, and vc4).

For GL_ARB_gl_spirv, we ultimately need to translate SPIR-V to LLVM IR. A path for this exists, but it's in the context of radv, not radeonsi. Still, the idea is to reuse this path.

Most of the differences between radv and radeonsi are in the ABI used by the shaders: the conventions by which the shaders on the GPU know where to load constants and image descriptors from, for example. The existing NIR-to-LLVM code needs to be adjusted to be compatible with radeonsi's ABI. I have mostly completed this work for simple VS-PS shader pipelines, which has the interesting side effect of allowing the GLSL-to-NIR conversion in radeonsi as well. We don't plan to use it soon, but it's nice to be able to compare.

Then there's adding SPIR-V support to the driver-independent mesa/main code. This is non-trivial, because while GL_ARB_gl_spirv has been designed to remove a lot of the cruft of the old GLSL paths, we still need more supporting code than a Vulkan driver. This still needs to be explored a bit; the main issue is that GL_ARB_gl_spirv allows using default-block uniforms, so the whole machinery around glUniform*() calls has to work, which requires setting up all the same internal data structures that are setup for GLSL programs. Oh, and it looks like assigning locations is required, too.

My current plan is to achieve all this by re-using the GLSL linker, giving a final picture that looks like this:

So the canonical path in radeonsi for GLSL remains GLSL -> AST -> IR -> TGSI -> LLVM (with an optional deviation along the IR -> NIR -> LLVM path for testing), while the path for GL_ARB_gl_spirv is SPIR-V -> NIR -> LLVM, with NIR-based linking in between. In radv, the path remains as it is today.

Now, you may rightfully say that the GLSL linker is a huge chunk of subtle code, and quite thoroughly invested in GLSL IR. How could it possibly be used with NIR?

The answer is that huge parts of the linker don't really that much about the code in the shaders that are being linked. They only really care about the variables: uniforms and shader inputs and outputs. True, there are a bunch of linking steps that touch code, but most of them aren't actually needed for SPIR-V. Most notably, GL_ARB_gl_spirv doesn't require intrastage linking, and it explicitly disallows the use of features that only exist in compatibility profiles.

So most of the linker functionality can be preserved simply by converting the relevant variables (shader inputs/outputs, uniforms) from NIR to IR, then performing the linking on those, and finally extracting the linker results and writing them back into NIR. This isn't too much work. Luckily, NIR reuses the GLSL IR type system.

There are still parts that might need to look at the actual shader code, but my hope is that they are few enough that they don't matter.

And by the way, some people might want to move the IR -> NIR translation to before linking, so this work would set a foundation for that as well.

Anyway, I got a ridiculously simple toy VS-PS pipeline working correctly this weekend. The real challenge now is to find actual test cases...

25 Jun 2017 9:10pm GMT

During this week, I decided to spend more time on language support: code completion, highlighting and so on. This part is provided by DU-Chain. Du-Chain stands for Definition-Use chain which consist of various contexts, declarations in these contexts and usages of these declarations.

First change improved declaration of variables in parameters of anonymous functions. In Go language, it is possible to define anonymous function and assign it to variable, pass as parameter (people use it for various callbacks for example) or simple call it. Before my change, parameters of anonymous functions were treated as declarations only in case of assigning that function to variable. Thus, if, for example, you typed the example of Gin web framework usage:

package main
import "gopkg.in/gin-gonic/gin.v1"
func main() {
r := gin.Default()
r.GET("/ping", func(c *gin.Context) {
c.JSON(200, gin.H{
"message": "pong",
})
})
r.Run() // listen and serve on 0.0.0.0:8080
}

you would end up with "c" not being highlighted / treated as variable. After my change, parameters of anonymous functions are treated as variable declarations in all three cases: assigning, passing and calling (see screenshots).

Before

After

Second change is under review and is aimed at adding code completion from embedded structs. In Go language, there is no such thing as inheritance - composition is preferred over it. Composition often has drawback - we need to pass all calls to "base" methods so there will be a lot of boilerplate code. In Go this problem is solved using "embedding" structs so their fields and methods are added to top-level struct. For example, struct A has a method Work and struct B embeds struct A. So both B.Work() and B.A.Work() are correct. Because of that we need to travel over all embedding tree for retrieving all possible completions - this is what my second change is aimed at.

Before

After

Third change added errors of parsing as problems in "Problems" view.

Fourth change fixed misplacing usage information in wrong context. Before that change, information of variable usages was placed in top context, which had led to not working semantic highlighting - variable declarations had different colors but usages were all same. Therefore, while improving overall correctness of generated DU-Chain I also fixed that issue and now variable usages are colored too (see screenshots)!

Before

After

Apart from DU-Chain improvements I got merged a basic project manager plugin which offers a template of simple console Go application and allows to build Go projects easier.

Looking forward to next week!

25 Jun 2017 4:24pm GMT

For the last month the main time I took the exams, because of this I did not do much for my project. Nevertheless, I implemented the basic primitives and tested them.

Let me tell you about them.

Wet map.

Water is the main part in watercolors. That's why I started with this.

Wet map contains 2 types of information: water value and speed vector. If the first parameter is clear, then the second one needs explanations. Speed vector needs for rewetting our splats (take it in mind, I will explain what this later).

All this values Wet map contains in KisPaintDevice:

KisPaintDeviceSP m_wetMap;

As the color space was chosen rgb16:

m_wetMap = new KisPaintDevice(KoColorSpaceRegistry::instance()->rgb16());

And there are information about water value and speed vector in pixel data.

But in this form Paint Device can't visualize wet map correctly:

So I transorm Paint Device for visualizing wet map correctly (because it will be important for artists, I think). And now it looks like this:

Splat

My implementation is based on a procedural brush. Every brush stamp is a union of dynamic splats. Here you can see the behavior of splats:

Also I tested reweting (when splat go to flowing state from fixed state):

And as a final test I made splat generator for simulating strokes:

What next?

It's high time to get splats to work in Krita. So I'm going to finish my plugin, and test splats behavior. But it will be primitive:

1. Clear canvas for updating splats
2. No undo/redo
3. Stupid singleton for splat storage

25 Jun 2017 3:33pm GMT

I was able to do major improvements to the build system of KStars. I think more and more open-source projects should pick up these low-hanging fruits with CMake and Clang:

- CCache: Speed-up the development time and working with git branches by caching the compiled object files.
- Unity Build: This simple "hack" can reduce the build time dramatically by compiling temporary C++ meta files in which the normal C++ files are included. The build time can be speeded up to 2x-3x for bigger projects.
- Clang Sanitizers: Use undefined behavior and address sanitizers to hunt down memory handling errors. Although the executable must be recompiled with Clang and special compiler flags, the resulted binary will run with minimal slowdown. It is not a complete replacement, but these sanitizers can catch most of the problems found by Valgrind during normal runtime.
- Clang Format: Format the source code with a real compiler engine.

More details are on our wiki page:
https://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Edu/KStars/C%2B%2B_developer_tools_with_KStars_on_Linux

25 Jun 2017 7:56am GMT

As mentioned in my previous blog, the X.Org Foundation now wants us to blog every week. Whilst that means shorter blogs (last week's was a tad long), it also means that there isn't much to blog about if I didn't do much in a week. Such is the case for this week, sadly. It's the last week of university, and so there are a few assignment deadlines that I needed to complete; I haven't been able to invest as much time into my project as I would have wanted.

23 Jun 2017 2:52pm GMT