Mesa Vulkan Drivers Reach An Inflection Point: Idea Raised To Be More Like Gallium3D

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mesa Vulkan Drivers Reach An Inflection Point: Idea Raised To Be More Like Gallium3D

With Mesa's Gallium3D architecture there are different state trackers like for VA-API and OpenGL that in turn run atop the different Gallium3D hardware drivers with an aim for common code re-use and making the most of capabilities for each of the drivers. With Mesa's Vulkan drivers there isn't quite that level of code sharing/re-use given Vulkan's low-level API approach, but now the idea is raised whether the Mesa Vulkan drivers may benefit from a more Gallium3D-like runtime...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-Vulkan-Driver-Runtime

[rmfx]

Great, but please, don't call that Vulkium3D.
Enough with the terrible names.

[microcode]

I think it's probably still not the right time to go consolidating more of the Vulkan drivers. They are progressing quickly enough as it is in my view.

[andyprough]

Great, but please, don't call that Vulkium3D.
Enough with the terrible names.

So Vulkigal3D it is then.

[Developer12]

I think it's probably still not the right time to go consolidating more of the Vulkan drivers. They are progressing quickly enough as it is in my view.

There are enough Vulkan drivers that have been written that we pretty much know how they ought to be done, but each one remains a long and laborious road because a huge amount of code has to be continually re-written. Now is an excellent time to move towards a common frontend, just as the various different OpenGL drivers did years ago with Gallium. It's the reason OpenGL drivers are significantly easier to bring up then Vulkan ones despite OpenGL being a much more onerous API to implement.

As the article points out, Vulkan drivers have been growing a wide array of extensions with it seems more on the way every month. This results in a significant amount of duplicated code in the frontend of each Vulkan driver. Yes there's common code to *sometimes* help with implementing the extensions, but as it stands each and every Vulkan driver has to individually do the work to implement them. This sucks massive donkey balls when different Vulkan drivers end up in with different levels of support.

Having a common Vulkan frontend which can do the lowering for all or most of these extensions would mean that every Vulkan driver gets support for every new extension almost automatically, while people implementing Vulkan drivers only need to worry about the shader compiler and the backend that directly drives the hardware (illustrated in Elkstand's accompanying blog post).

[Developer12]

Great, but please, don't call that Vulkium3D.
Enough with the terrible names.

I suppose it will be called Vanadium.

[Shtirlic]

Please use some of the Iceland Volcano names, like Eyjafjallajökull

[WiR3D]

Oooooo Vitaly is commenting on that MR, always appreciate the depth of his comments

[Nuc!eoN]

I suppose it will be called Vanadium.

Vanadium3D could actually be a pretty cool name imho 😎

[partcyborg]

I suppose it will be called Vanadium.

Romulan3d