Early-Stage Apple Mesa Vulkan Driver Now Runs VKCube Demo

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Early-Stage Apple Mesa Vulkan Driver Now Runs VKCube Demo

In addition to Alyssa Rosenzweig leading the work on bringing up OpenGL driver support for Apple M1/M2 SoCs with the Mesa "AGX" Gallium3D driver, developer Ella Stanforth has been working on "AGXV" as a Vulkan driver implementation for the Apple Silicon hardware on Linux. As of yesterday, she hit the milestone of being able to run the VKCube demo...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-AGXV-Apple-Vulkan-VKCube

[gsedej]

Nice work.

I am really impressed so many female developers works on linux-mac/M1/M2/... projects, Alyssa, Ella, Lina. Really happy for them and projects.

[johanb]

Awesome!
Am I naive to think that it sounds more important for the team to focus on just the Vulkan driver and utilize Zink for OpenGL?

Personally I don't like macbooks, they have some really nice features and specifications but they have just as many quirks and annoyances so for me there are better options. But the more options the better!

[Developer12]

Awesome!
Am I naive to think that it sounds more important for the team to focus on just the Vulkan driver and utilize Zink for OpenGL?

Personally I don't like macbooks, they have some really nice features and specifications but they have just as many quirks and annoyances so for me there are better options. But the more options the better!

They're focusing on openGL first because it's simpler and faster to get working. The vulkan driver has been estimated to take a much longer time yet before it can run zink.

[caligula]

Nice work.

I am really impressed so many female developers works on linux-mac/M1/M2/... projects, Alyssa, Ella, Lina. Really happy for them and projects.

A bit off-topic, but the concentration of trans women seems exceptionally high in Rust/GPU driver communities. Just wanted to point out the non-binary nature of that remark.

[amxfonseca]

A bit off-topic, but the concentration of trans women seems exceptionally high in Rust/GPU driver communities. Just wanted to point out the non-binary nature of that remark.

Given how insecure the old time C programmers sound when confronted with something new and different, I don’t blame them from picking the Rust community

[gsedej]

A bit off-topic, but the concentration of trans women seems exceptionally high in Rust/GPU driver communities. Just wanted to point out the non-binary nature of that remark.

Don't really care, just hope that progs will be binary compatible with the HW.

[dragon321]

Awesome!
Am I naive to think that it sounds more important for the team to focus on just the Vulkan driver and utilize Zink for OpenGL?

Personally I don't like macbooks, they have some really nice features and specifications but they have just as many quirks and annoyances so for me there are better options. But the more options the better!

Mesa architecture let you share a lot of code so providing OpenGL support is not that complicated as it would with developing everything from scratch. Due to Vulkan low level nature, sharing code between different hardware is actually more difficult. Also most GUI still relies on OpenGL for acceleration.

[ids1024]

Mesa architecture let you share a lot of code so providing OpenGL support is not that complicated as it would with developing everything from scratch. Due to Vulkan low level nature, sharing code between different hardware is actually more difficult. Also most GUI still relies on OpenGL for acceleration.

In this particular case, they've also run into some complications from the fact that the hardware wasn't designed for Vulkan, and doesn't provide anything Metal doesn't need. Luckily MoltenVK has already had to find solutions to basically the same problems.

[mdedetrich]

In this particular case, they've also run into some complications from the fact that the hardware wasn't designed for Vulkan, and doesn't provide anything Metal doesn't need. Luckily MoltenVK has already had to find solutions to basically the same problems.

If MoltenVK can cleanly map from Vulkan to Metal (which it does for the most part) then implicitly this means the hardware was designed for Vulkan (or more accurately, a slight variation of Vulkan).

The main difference is using different shader languages but MoltenVK already contains tools that lets you convert between the different shaders.