RADV Radeon Driver Is Now "Effectively" A Conformant Vulkan Implementation

The open-source Radeon Vulkan driver, RADV, has now passed another important milestone.

David Airlie shared today that the RADV driver on Mesa Git is now effectively conformant per The Khronos Group's publicly available Vulkan CTS (Conformance Test Suite). All the relevant Vulkan CTS test-cases for the Radeon hardware tested is passing for its capabilities.

None of the tests are failing, but this doesn't make it officially conformant as it hasn't been certified by Khronos. So it's basically unofficially passing without going through the formal Khronos approval process. It remains to be seen if any RADV stakeholders like Red Hat, Valve, or Google intend to pay for RADV certification. Or, rather, the likelihood Khronos will vet this community implementation for free -- similar to the arrangement they are working on with the X.Org Foundation for getting Nouveau OpenGL CTS testing and their past communications about willing to support open-source implementations of their APIs.

David shared this milestone on LiveJournal. Now if only AMD was able to move along in open-sourcing their Vulkan driver or how things will ultimately shake out... Last we've heard in our forums, they are still pursuing the opening of their Vulkan driver, albeit the legal/review process is time consuming. This AMD Vulkan driver is not Mesa-based and thus can co-exist just fine. AMD has said they have no plans of adopting RADV as they still need to maintain their own Vulkan driver anyways for Windows and the code is largely-shared so it wouldn't magically free up resources for RADV as no duplication is happening. The proprietary Radeon Vulkan Windows/Linux driver has been conformant under Khronos terms since last summer.