The RADV Radeon Vulkan Linux Driver Continues Picking Up Features

Written by Michael Larabel in Radeon on 25 September 2016 at 04:29 PM EDT. 10 Comments
RADEON
It has been about two weeks since last reporting on "RADV" Radeon Vulkan activities, but development hasn't let up and there has been several feature commits since then on this open-source Vulkan Linux driver for Radeon AMDGPU-interfacing hardware.

For those not following David Airlie's "semi-interesting" Mesa branch, some of the highlights since I last talked about it on Phoronix include:

- Wayland support for RADV.

- There's also Xlib WSI support (windowing system integration).

- Some changes for helping to bring-up Southern Islands support on this driver.

- Compute shader based resolves.

- Enabling HiZ by default.

And there has been various other changes and fixes, including porting of some more code over from Intel's "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver. The updated TODO list also gives a better look at the overall RADV state.

So far RADV continues making much progress with AMD having not yet open-sourced their Vulkan Linux driver. It's still sounding like AMD might just work towards open-sourcing bits relevant to RADV where this community-originated driver may end up being the long-term default open-source Radeon Vulkan driver. It will be interesting to see when it's integrated into mainline Mesa. I will probably do some fresh RADV vs. AMD Radeon Vulkan benchmarking in a week or two once the Linux 4.9 development kicks off with the merging of the new DRM-Next features.
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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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