Initial release of AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan

[Dave Airlie]

On 22 December 2017 at 21:03, Mao, David <David.Mao at amd.com> wrote:
> We are pleased to announce the initial release of AMD Open Source Driver for
> Vulkan.
>
>
>
> The AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan is an open-source Vulkan driver for
> Radeon graphics adapters on Linux. It is built on top of AMD's Platform
> Abstraction Library (PAL), a shared component that is designed to
> encapsulate certain hardware and OS-specific programming details for many of
> AMD's 3D and compute drivers. Leveraging PAL can help provide a consistent
> experience across platforms, including support for recently released GPUs
> and compatibility with AMD developer tools.
>
>
>
> The driver uses the LLVM-Based Pipeline Compiler (LLPC) library to compile
> shaders that compose a particular VkPipeline object. LLPC builds on LLVM's
> existing shader compilation infrastructure for AMD GPUs to generate code
> objects compatible with PAL's pipeline ABI.
>
>
>
> The AMD Open Source Driver for Vulkan is designed to support the following
> features:
>
> - Vulkan 1.0
>
> - More than 30 extensions
>
> - Radeon GPUProfiler tracing
>
> - Built-in debug and profiling tools
>
> - Mid-command buffer preemption and SR-IOV virtualization
>
>
>
> The following features and improvements are planned in future releases:
>
> - Upcoming versions of the Vulkan API
>
> - Hardware performance counter collection through RenderDoc
>
> - LLPC optimizations to improve GPU-limited performance and compile time
>
> - Optimizations to improve CPU-limited performance
>
>
>
> Please refer to  the README file under
> https://github.com/GPUOpen-Drivers/AMDVLK   for more information.  Looking
> forward to hearing your feedback.

Excellent!

Before I spend much time digging into the code, I am wondering how
much thought on
development model and future development has been put into this from
AMD perspective.

How does AMD envisage development on this going forward, how will AMD
internal developement
team engage with community development efforts on this code base?

How will code come be integrated from the AMD internal codebase into
this codebase?
How will external contributions be taken into this code base and
merged internally?
How often will this codebase be updated? every day/week/month/hardware release?
Will llvm master eventually be shippable? Will new llvm features be
developed in the open?

At the moment radv and anv cooperate on developing new features under
Khronos, will
AMD be open to developing new features internally at Khronos while
they are still pre-ratification?

Dave.