What's Still Left TODO With The Intel ANV Vulkan Driver

With yesterday having marked one year since the release of Vulkan as well as one year since the ANV Vulkan driver code was open-sourced, here's a look at some of what's still left to be tackled by this open-source Vulkan Linux driver for HD/Iris Graphics.

One of the easy approaches to get an idea what's still missing is by this TODO list maintained by the ANV driver developers. As of this morning it has:

Missing Features:
- Storage Image Without Format
- Investigate CTS failures on HSW
- Pipeline statistics queries
- Sparse memory

Performance:
- Multi-{sampled/gen8,LOD} HiZ
- Compressed multisample support
- Pushing pieces of UBOs?
- Enable guardband clipping
- Use soft-pin to avoid relocations

Some of that work has actually been tackled at least in part like Feral recently providing shaderStorageImageWriteWithoutFormat.

The current Vulkan API version exposed is 1.0.39 for ANV.

Another way to get an accurate look at what's not yet supported by this Vulkan driver is by poking at anv_GetPhysicalDeviceFeatures. Vulkan device features not yet enabled include multiDrawIndirect, depthBounds, pipelineStatisticsQuery, shaderStorageImageMultisample, shaderStorageImageReadWithoutFormat, shaderInt64, shaderInt16, shaderResourceMinLod, variableMultisampleRate, inheritedQueries. Obviously some of those features are more important than others. Those unfamiliar with a particular feature can find all of them documented via VkPhysicalDeviceFeatures.

Overall though the Intel Vulkan driver remains in good shape one year on and continues working with the currently available Vulkan Linux games. I'll have some fresh Intel ANV benchmarks of the current Git state shortly.