Blog
Descriptors are hard
Over the weekend, I asked on twitter if people would be interested in a rant about descriptor sets. As of the writing of this post, it has 46 likes so I’ll count that as a yes.
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In defense of NIR
NIR has been an integral part of the Mesa driver stack for about six or seven years now (depending on how you count) and a lot has changed since NIR first landed at the end of 2014 and I wrote my initial NIR notes. Also, for various reasons, I’ve had to give my NIR elevator pitch a few times lately. I think it’s time for a new post. This time on why, after working on this mess for seven years, I still think NIR was the right call.
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Hello, Collabora!
Ever since I announced that I was leaving Intel, there’s been a lot of speculation as to where I’d end up. I left it a bit quiet over the holidays but, now that we’re solidly in 2022, It’s time to let it spill. As of January 24, I’ll be at Collabora!
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PyCook
A few months ago, I went on a quest to better digitize and collect a bunch of the recipes I use on a regular basis. Like most people, I’ve got a 3-ring binder of stuff I’ve printed from the internet, a box with the usual 4x6 cards, most of which are hand-written, and a stack of cookbooks. I wanted something that could be both digital and physical and which would make recipes easier to share. I also wanted whatever storage system I developed to be something stupid simple. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about myself over the years it’s that if I make something too hard, I’ll never get around to it.
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New blog!
This week, I’ve taken advantage of some of my funemployment time to we work our website infrastructure. As part of my new job (more on that soon!) I’ll be communicating publicly more and I need a better blog space. I set up a blogger a few years ago but I really hate it. It’s not that Blogger is a terrible platform per se. It just doesn’t integrate well with the rest of my website and the comments I got were 90% spam.
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Getting the most out of your Intel integrated GPU on Linux
About a year ago ago, I got a new laptop: a late 2019 Razer Blade Stealth 13. It sports an Intel i7-1065G7 with the best Intel’s Ice Lake graphics along with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650. Apart from needing an ACPI lid quirk and the power management issues described here, it’s been a great laptop so far and the Linux experience has been very smooth.
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Does subgroup/wave size matter?
This week, I had a conversation with one of my coworkers about our subgroup/wave size heuristic and, in particular, whether or not control-flow divergence should be considered as part of the choice. This lead me down a fun path of looking into the statistics of control-flow divergence and the end result is somewhat surprising: Once you get above about an 8-wide subgroup, the subgroup size doesn’t matter.
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Transform feedback is terrible, so why are we doing it?
In the latest Vulkan spec update from Khronos (version 1.1.88), there’s a new extension called VK_EXT_transform_feedback. Some of you might be thinking, “Finally! Why’d it take them so long to add this obviously useful feature? It should have been there on day 1.” The answer to that question is that transform feedback (or streamout in D3D lingo) is a terrible feature that we all regret putting into OpenGL and OpenGL ES and we didn’t want that baggage in Vulkan.
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The quest for known behavior
This post is one I’ve been meaning to write for a while to explain my personal philosophy about designing, testing, and tooling APIs to provide the best experience for the implementers and users of that API.
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Optimizing DXVK apps
One of the recent happenings in the world of Linux graphics is rise of DXVK. For those who don’t know, DXVK is a translation layer which translates D3D11 and D3D10 Api calls to Vulkan. It’s intended to be used together with Wine to allow more Windows game titles to run directly on Linux without modification. Wine already has a D3D10/11 to OpenGL translator but DXVK has generally better performance and compatibility than what is built into core Wine.
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