KDE's KWin Doesn't Plan To Use The Vulkan Graphics API
KDE developer Martin Gräßlin explained today that he has no plans on making use of Vulkan within KDE's compositor / window manager.
KWin doesn't support threaded rendering as would be needed by Vulkan, Vulkan for rendering can be avoided via other ways, and just more work. Martin wrote, "Overall Vulkan looks to me like a lot of work as once again we would have to add a new compositing backend, write a new low level interaction, rewrite all shaders, etc. etc. Going to Vulkan early would mean introducing more complexity to KWin, more different code paths our users might use. It sounds like a mood exercise to do so. But I also doubt that there will be useable Vulkan drivers any time soon."
In the end he intends to devote his resources on improving KWin's OpenGL supoport, where right now they aren't making use of OpenGL 3/4. However, he does acknowledge that Vulkan should be some great technology.
More details via this mailing list post.
KWin doesn't support threaded rendering as would be needed by Vulkan, Vulkan for rendering can be avoided via other ways, and just more work. Martin wrote, "Overall Vulkan looks to me like a lot of work as once again we would have to add a new compositing backend, write a new low level interaction, rewrite all shaders, etc. etc. Going to Vulkan early would mean introducing more complexity to KWin, more different code paths our users might use. It sounds like a mood exercise to do so. But I also doubt that there will be useable Vulkan drivers any time soon."
In the end he intends to devote his resources on improving KWin's OpenGL supoport, where right now they aren't making use of OpenGL 3/4. However, he does acknowledge that Vulkan should be some great technology.
More details via this mailing list post.
22 Comments