RADV & ANV Vulkan Drivers Are One Command Away On Ubuntu 17.04

Written by Michael Larabel in Ubuntu on 26 March 2017 at 07:54 AM EDT. 2 Comments
UBUNTU
Just as a quick notice for those curious, while Mesa 17.0 has worked its way recently into Ubuntu 17.04 "Zesty Zapus", the Vulkan support isn't enabled by default

Similar to Ubuntu 16.10, the Mesa Vulkan drivers are not present by default on new Ubuntu installations. But to get the packaged Vulkan drivers, simply sudo apt install mesa-vulkan-drivers. When running some tests on Ubuntu 17.04 this weekend, I was a bit surprised to see that Mesa's Intel ANV and Radeon RADV drivers aren't present by default -- since it's been one year since the Vulkan 1.0 debut and the ANV/RADV drivers have matured a lot during this time. There's also more and more software becoming available that can make use of Vulkan while personally wishing for more Linux desktops to push Vulkan. But it's easy to install the Vulkan drivers as mentioned. Similarly, vulkan-utils isn't installed by default.


Understandably, this is probably because nothing in Ubuntu main is requiring Vulkan support at this time. With GTK4 bringing a Vulkan renderer, Vulkan support coming in Qt 5.10, it will probably only be a matter of time before seeing the Vulkan loader and drivers shipped by default in Ubuntu as we are seeing this low-level, performance-oriented graphics API reach beyond just games. With Mir 1.0 they will also be bringing Vulkan support for allowing Vulkan software to run atop their new display server.

Running some Mesa 17.0 Ubuntu 17.04 tests and will have that data to share shortly.
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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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