Intel's Jay Shader Compiler Passes the Vulkan CTS on Xe2 and Xe3

The Jay shader compiler that Intel is building for its open-source Linux graphics drivers has reached another important milestone: it has passed the Vulkan Conformance Test Suite (Vulkan CTS) on hardware from the Xe2 generation and the newest Xe3.

Jay is a new shader compiler based on an SSA representation, intended for use in the Mesa Iris Gallium3D (OpenGL) and ANV (Vulkan) drivers. The effort is led by Alyssa Rosenzweig, who joined Intel last year. Before that she worked as a contractor for Valve on the graphics stack, and prior to that she led the work on the Mesa drivers for Apple Silicon graphics as part of the Asahi Linux project.

The journey in under a year

When Jay was first unveiled publicly in April, the pairing of the compiler with Intel's drivers was already passing the conformance tests for OpenGL ES 3.0 and OpenCL 3.0, but things were not yet moving on the Vulkan front — not a single CTS test passed. That changed this week: Jay's code landed in the Mesa 26.3-devel branch, and the Vulkan CTS now passes on both current architectures — Xe2 and Xe3.

As part of this work, 63 patches were merged into the Mesa git repository on Friday: they add new functionality, VRT optimizations and bug fixes. Rosenzweig's own remark in the merge request is telling: this set of changes clears out the last patches marked “hack — do not upstream” that she had had to carry around with her. Once they were merged, the main branch, in her words, essentially passes the Vulkan CTS on Xe2 and Xe3.

For a project that only surfaced publicly in April, this is a notable achievement. Ahead lies the Mesa 26.3 release, scheduled for November, by which point it will become clearer just how far Jay has come. The big question for the future, though, is when the compiler will be ready to become the default driver for Intel's open-source graphics drivers on Linux.

Source: Phoronix