RADV Radeon Vulkan Driver One Step Closer To Being Merged In Mesa

While the ultimate vision of the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver isn't yet clear with RADV being the front-runner so far as the community-based driver while AMD has yet to open up their official Vulkan driver and there's been few remarks about RADV from AMD employees (aside from John Bridgman in our forums), RADV inched forward today in moving closer to being merged in mainline Mesa.

Earlier today David Airlie, one of the two original RADV developers, sent out precursor patches to merging RADV. The patches shift around code that's used by RADV into a common location in Mesa. What RADV re-uses includes the addrlib and some other common header files.

Those patches have already wound up in Mesa Git so that this AMD-specific code is moved to a location that can be more easily used by RADV without having to duplicate the code. This is just one small but important step towards potentially merging RADV to mainline Mesa.

Based upon the comments made by John Bridgman in our forums, AMD may end up shifting their open-source Vulkan approach as first focusing upon going through the open-source process of their existing Vulkan code for functionality that would immediately benefit RADV the most as opposed to waiting until being able to open-source their complete Vulkan driver.