A Student Developer Wants To Write A Software Implementation Of Vulkan For Mesa

[phoronix]

Phoronix: A Student Developer Wants To Write A Software Implementation Of Vulkan For Mesa

Vulkan is going on one year old and while the hardware driver support has continued to advance, we haven't yet seen a software implementation of Vulkan for running on a CPU. Of course, not for expecting any performance miracle or the like, but as a vendor-neutral platform for being able to test Vulkan's behavior, certain fallback scenarios, and other use-cases like Mesa's LLVMpipe/swrast/Softpipe software rasterizers...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GSoC-EVoC-Vulkan-Software

[eydee]

Interesting. It'll take ages though, unless others join the project.

[triangle]

It would be nice to be able to play with Vulkan on my Sandy Bridge laptop.

[VikingGe]

It'll take ages though

Not necessarily, unless you expect great performance. Basic stuff like rasterization and texture filtering already exists in drivers like softpipe, and for shaders it should be possible to get optimized x86 code using LLVM in some way. TBH I believe getting those to work is the hardest part of all.

No one needs to re-invent the wheel here, and the majority of Vulkan functions should be easy to implement, especially since the driver may simply ignore GPU-specific stuff like memory layout transitions.