RADV External Memory Patches Revised, Needed For SteamVR Support

Bas Nieuwenhuizen has taken to revising David Airlie's work on external memory support for the RADV Vulkan driver, which are among the extensions needed by SteamVR on Linux.

Back in late February was when the RADV SteamVR source changes were published but not all of the work has yet been mainlined, thus degrading the Radeon VR Linux experience. Fortunately, Nieuwenhuizen has taken to revising the work and will hopefully be merged soon.

VK_KHX_external_memory_capabilities, VK_KHX_external_memory, and VK_KHX_external_memory_fd are the external memory extensions for being able to export images to a file descriptor on Linux systems. But as these are still experimental "KHX" extensions, it's yet to be decided if they will just be pushed into Mesa as-is or hidden behind an environment variable or the like until the extensions are declared by Khronos' Vulkan working group as stable.

These latest RADV external memory patches can be found on Mesa-dev. Let's hope Mesa 17.2 RADV will play well with SteamVR.

Update: The patches have now landed in Mesa Git.