Introduction

The Gallium llvmpipe driver is a software rasterizer that uses LLVM to do runtime code generation. Shaders, point/line/triangle rasterization and vertex processing are implemented with LLVM IR which is translated to x86 or x86-64 machine code. Also, the driver is multithreaded to take advantage of multiple CPU cores (up to 8 at this time). It's the fastest software rasterizer for Mesa.

Requirements

An x86 or amd64 processor. 64-bit 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. Version 2.8 recommended. 2.6 or later required.

NOTE: LLVM 2.8 and earlier will not work on systems that support the Intel AVX extensions (e.g. Sandybridge). LLVM's code generator will fail when trying to emit AVX instructions. This was fixed in LLVM 2.9.

For Linux, on a recent Debian based distribution do: 

     aptitude install llvm-dev
For a RPM-based distribution do: 

     yum install llvm-devel

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.

scons (optional)

Building

To build everything on Linux invoke scons as: 
  scons build=debug libgl-xlib
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 build=debug libgl-gdi

Using

On Linux, building will create a drop-in alternative for libGL.so into 
  build/foo/gallium/targets/libgl-xlib/libGL.so
or 
  lib/gallium/libGL.so
To use it set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable accordingly. 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.

Profiling

To profile llvmpipe you should pass the options 
  scons build=profile
This will ensure that frame pointers are used both in C and JIT functions, and that no tail call optimizations are done by gcc. To better profile JIT code you'll need to build LLVM with oprofile integration. 
  ./configure \
      --prefix=$install_dir \
      --enable-optimized \
      --disable-profiling \
      --enable-targets=host-only \
      --with-oprofile

  make -C "$build_dir"
  make -C "$build_dir" install

  find "$install_dir/lib" -iname '*.a' -print0 | xargs -0 strip --strip-debug
The you should define 
  export LLVM=/path/to/llvm-2.6-profile
and rebuild.

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