With the soon to be released Mesa 20.2, the RADV Vulkan driver is using the ACO back-end by default that's been developed with funding by Valve as an alternative to AMD's official "AMDGPU" LLVM back-end. For those wondering how this shader compiler back-end compares and more intricate details of its design, some extensive documentation has finally been added to the Mesa tree.

Merged today to Mesa Git is some detailed documentation concerning the design of the ACO compiler back-end currently used by RADV and still being worked on as a possible alternative for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for compiling GLSL shaders.

The documentation is a fun read for those interested in the technical aspects of this compiler back-end. Also covered are details around debugging and the detected environment variables.

See the newly added AMD ACO documentation via this commit .