Canonical/Ubuntu Developers Start Looking At The Vulkan Graphics API

Developers at Canonical working on the Mir Display Server for Ubuntu Linux have publicly confirmed for the first time they're starting to look at the Vulkan graphics API.

The Vulkan graphics API has yet to be formally made public, but there's much speculation that will happen next month at SIGGRAPH. Canonical developers are likely looking at a near-final version of the specification as the company joined The Khronos Group last year. Canonical joined Khronos to interact with their graphics working groups largely to help Mir (and indirectly, Wayland). Ubuntu developers investing the time now to start looking at Vulkan would likely confirm that the formal 1.0 release isn't too far out.

Vulkan support on Mir shouldn't be too much of a big deal since (like OpenGL) the graphics API was designed to be OS-agnostic and presumably EGL will be its underlying windowing system interface preference.

Kevin Gunn had mentioned in his weekly Unity8/Mir report just that they "started Vulkan evaulation." Recently the Mir developers have also been woring on buffer semantics, lag minimization, supporting the thread sanitizer during continuous integration tests, and making other improvements throughout. More details via the weekly report.