<div dir="ltr">The Intel mesa team is pleased to announce a brand-new open-source Vulkan driver for Intel hardware. We've been working hard on this over the course of the past year or so and are excited to finally share it with the community. We will work on up-streaming the driver in the next few weeks and hope to have it all in place in time for mesa 11.3 (mesa 12?). In the mean time, the driver can be found in the "vulkan" branch of the mesa git repo on <a href="http://freedesktop.org">freedesktop.org</a>: <a href="https://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/log/?h=vulkan">https://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/log/?h=vulkan</a> More information on building the driver and running a few simple apps can be found on the <a href="http://01.org">01.org</a> web site: <a href="https://01.org/linuxgraphics/blogs/jekstrand/2016/open-source-vulkan-drivers-intel-hardware">https://01.org/linuxgraphics/blogs/jekstrand/2016/open-source-vulkan-drivers-intel-hardware</a> We have talked to people at Red Hat and Cannonical and binaries should be available for Fedora and Ubuntu soon. We will update the page on <a href="http://01.org">01.org</a> with links as soon as they are available. We have also created a small test suite called crucible which contains a few hundred tests (mostly for miptrees) that we created when bringing up the driver. This isn't really intended to be the piglit of vulkan. With the CTS being publicly available, most cross-platform tests should go there. We mostly made crucible so that we could write a few tests early on to get us going and for tests that were targetted specifically at our implementation. None the less, they may prove useful to someone and we are happy to share them. The crucible source code can be found at <a href="https://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/crucible/">https://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/crucible/</a> Frequently Asked Questions: What all hardware does it support? The driver currently supports Sky Lake all the way back to Ivy Bridge. The driver is Vulkan 1.0 conformant for 64-bit builds on Sky Lake, Broadwell, and Braswell. We are still having a couple of 32-bit issues and support for Haswell, Ivy Bridge, and Bay Trail should be considered experimental. How much code is shared between the Vulkan and GL drivers? For shaders, we're using a SPIR-V to NIR pass which is new, and a few new NIR lowering passes for things that we previously depended on GLSL IR to handle. Beyond that, we're using the same core NIR and the same back-end compiler that we have for GL. We're carrying a few patches against the back-end compiler, but the delta is very small and it's all stuff that we eventually want to do for GL anyway. The main API handling and state setup code is all new and written from the ground-up for Vulkan. For actually packing hardware packets, we are using a codegen system that Kristian developed early on in the project that's based on an XML description of the hardware packets. The result is state setup code that's both easier to work with and maybe even a little more efficient than what we have in mesa today. We also have a brand-new surface layout library called ISL that handles all of the surface layout calculations. ISL should have most of the code required to do surface layout all the way back to gen4. Once we get aux surface support in ISL (required for HiZ, MSAA compression, and CCMS/fast clears), we hope to start using it in the GL driver as well. How much code could be shared with other Vulkan drivers? Not as much as you would think. The SPIR-V to NIR translator and the rest of the NIR compiler stack could obviously be re-used by anyone willing to tie NIR into their back-end. The rest of the driver is, and will probably stay, Intel-specific. Vulkan is a very low-level API, possibly even lower-level than gallium. A lot of the things that we share between drivers in mesa today: the front-end compiler, state tracking, error-handling, etc. is pushed off to either the application or third-party layers in the Vulkan world. That said, anyone wishing to write their own Vulkan driver, is more than welcome to use ours as a reference and steal whatever they'd like from it. What are your up-streaming plans? Before we can land the SPIR-V to NIR layer, there are a number of core NIR changes that need to land first. All of that code needs to be reviewed as it interacts with the GL driver and we don't want any regressions. We are also still carrying a few patches against the i965 back-end compiler that need a little more testing and proper review. It will take some time to get all of that up-stream. Once that is completed and all of the NIR and i965 back-end bits are in place, SPIR-V, ISL, and the Vulkan driver itself can probably be merged without further review since they are fairly self-contained and are new functionality. We should easily be able to get the driver up-stream in time for the 11.3 (or 12.0) release. What window-systems are supported? The driver already has window system integration (WSI) support for X11 with DRI3 and Wayland. The Vulkan WSI extensions don't mesh well with DRI2 so supporting that isn't really an option. If you want to Vulkan applications under X, you'll need to enable DRI3. Will it run X Vulkan application/demo? Hopefully. Our driver does pass the conformance suite which means the chances are pretty good that any given app will at least work. However, no test suite is perfect and our driver and the Vulkan ecosystem are still young, so there may be bugs. If you do run into problems with an application, please file a bug against mesa at <a href="http://bugs.freedesktop.org">bugs.freedesktop.org</a> and we will get to it as quickly as we can. Where did Kristian, Jason and Chad go? Well, now you know. :-) We hope you have as much fun hacking on and playing with this driver as we did writing it. As always, questions, comments, and bug reports are more than welcome. Happy hacking! Best Regards, Jason Ekstrand, Kristian Høgsberg Kristensen, Chad Versace, and the rest of the Intel mesa team </div>