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.

Ella Stanforth has contributed to Mesa in the past, primarily around the Broadcom / Raspberry Pi Vulkan driver support, while more recently she has been working on a Vulkan driver with the Asahi Linux developers for supporting the Vulkan API with Apple Silicon on Linux.

The Apple open-source Vulkan driver support is coming along.

Over the past few months she has been working on this Vulkan driver work happening concurrently to the Gallium3D OpenGL effort as well as the Rust-written DRM kernel driver in development. Yesterday Ella tweeted the news that VKCube, a basic Vulkan rendered cube demo, is running with the driver:

VKCUBE ON @AsahiLinux !!! pic.twitter.com/a7pMcLurpT

— Ella Stanforth (@EllaStanforth) October 23, 2022

The Apple Vulkan driver "AGXV" is currently out-of-tree while she has been staging the development code via her FreeDesktop.org GitLab repository until it's in a state ready for mainlining.