Future direction of the Mesa Vulkan runtime (or "should we build a new gallium?")

[Zack Rusin]

On Wed, Jan 24, 2024 at 6:57 PM Marek Olšák <maraeo at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Gallium looks like it was just a copy of DX10, and likely many things were known from DX10 in advance before anything started. Vulkanium doesn't have anything to draw inspiration from. It's a completely unexplored idea.

I'm not sure if I follow this. GNU/Linux didn't have a unified driver
interface to implement GL, but Windows did have a standardized
interface to implement D3D10 which we drew inspiration from. The same
is still true if you s/GL/Vulkan/ and s/D3D10/D3D12/. It's just that
more features of modern API's are tied to kernel features (i.e. wddm
versions) than in the past, but with gpuvm, drm scheduler and syncobj
that's also going to be Vulkan's path.
Now, you might say that this time we're not going to use any lessons
from Windows and this interface will be completely unlike what Windows
does for D3D12, which is fine but I still wouldn't call the idea of
standardizing an interface for a low level graphics API a completely
unexplored idea given that it works on Windows on an api that's a lot
more like Vulkan, than D3D10 was like GL.

z