Valve Developer Plumbs VK_KHR_maintenance1 For RADV Driver

VK_KHR_maintenance1 is one of the new extensions added to the big Vulkan 1.0.39 update. A Valve developer has fired off a series of patches for making the necessary changes for supporting it with the RADV Radeon Vulkan Mesa driver.

Andres Rodriguez, the former AMD developer who joined Valve last year and has begun contributing to the Mesa stack, provided the patches last night for letting RADV advertise VK_KHR_maintenance1. Intel's ANV Vulkan driver wired up this extension in Mesa Git just a few days ago.

VK_KHR_maintenance1 marks the presence of various "maintenance" alterations that didn't make it for the original Vulkan 1.0 specific. VK_KHR_maintenance1 refines various features like allowing 2D and 2D array image views to be created from 3D images, let drivers to do transfers/clears of image formats they don't otherwise support, a new command to release any unused command pool memory back to the system, and other minor changes.

With these 7 patches, there is enough to flip on the extension but there are some patches it depends upon that haven't yet merged to Mesa Git. It's great to see the open-source Vulkan drivers staying so close behind in the upstream developments of the Vulkan graphics API, especially considering how long OpenGL was trailing for the free software drivers.