Mesa's Intel Vulkan Driver Introduces A Null Hardware Layer

Intel's latest addition to Mesa 21.1 with their "ANV" Vulkan driver is... A null hardware layer.

This "nullhw" Vulkan layer is to disable all rendering and compute commands in the command parsing hardware. This null hardware Vulkan layer was written a year ago but only merged now.

This Vulkan layer for Intel's ANV driver is similar to Intel's "Blackhole" render extension for OpenGL. The function that this null hardware layer serves is for quickly finding CPU bottlenecks within the driver.

So this Vulkan layer isn't useful to end users / gamers directly but in turn its usage by Intel's open-source driver developers should help uncover new areas for performance optimizations.

The layer is now in Mesa Git.