Mesa now has a patch to enable a shader cache for radeonsi (AMD)

This will probably be to the delight of many AMD graphics card owners who use the open source Mesa graphics drivers: A patch has been sent into the Mesa-dev mailing list for radeonsi to 'Add disk shader cache'.

I should note, that this patch comes from a newer developer who notes it's their first message to the Mesa-dev mailing list. The patch may need a lot of work, but it's nice to see someone make a start on it.

Also, since this is in the Mesa-dev mailing list it is not in the current Mesa code as it has not been accepted or reviewed as of yet.

The developer said this:

QuoteHi, This is my first mail to the list.

I'm not sure this is the right way to do this, it's my first attempt to patch mesa.
I've tested on a radeon HD7950 with glxgears and quake3. I have some binary shaders in ~/.cache/mesa after running them, and they are re-used when re-launching them.
I wanted to test more recent games, but the LD_LIBRARY_PATH trick didn't work with steam games, and I don't want to install mesa master system-wide.

They also note that it is missing features right now like:
- add #if ENABLE_SHADER_CACHE where needed.
- when loading from disk cache, also insert it to RAM cache.

You can see the mailing list entry here.

I don't own any AMD cards to test it with, nor do I understand the technical bits behind the code. I will leave it up to you in the comments to decide how it looks. I do understand that a shader cache is needed and highly sought-after by many. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.