Vulkan to Metal translation layer in Mesa3D?

[Aitor Camacho Larrondo]

Hi all,

Just wanted to extend the reach of issue
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/11990 as suggested by a
comment. I would like to keep all discussion inside the issue if possible!

Here are the contents of said issue:

There are 2 goals to this issue:

   1. Understand how the Mesa3D community feels about having a Vulkan to
   Metal translation layer exist within the project.
   2. Get Mesa3D developers’ concerns on technical feasibility for the
   project we may not be aware of.

We are evaluating the feasibility and value of creating a Vulkan to Metal
translation layer in the Mesa3D project. The project would cover Apple
silicon GPUs, specifically M1/A14 and later. The decision to cover these
GPU families is due to the fact that Metal does not have the same features
available in all hardware, and these GPUs are the ones with features that
would simplify the implementation of the translation layer.

As always, there are pros and cons that need to be considered. There are
existing translation layers that have proven the success of this such as
Dozen and Zink. Moreover, there are also existing solutions in other Vulkan
implementations that solve some of the Vulkan to Metal translation issues
that could be leveraged.

While it is true that the framework to develop Vulkan drivers in Mesa3D is
a huge factor that weighs in favor of this project, there is also work to
be done to use existing utilities and tools like NIR for such a project.
These present extra challenges and work that needs to be done since there
is no NIR to Metal Shading Language (MSL) translation for example. There
may also be other unknowns that we are not aware of at the moment of
writing, and for this we would like to ask the community to bring them up
in this issue so we can tackle the project with as much information as
possible at hand.

As mentioned at the beginning of the issue, please do let us know your
thoughts. Looking forward to hearing from the Mesa3D community!

Best,
Aitor
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/attachments/20241008/b424741f/attachment.htm>