Vulkan Support Still Isn't Ready For Ubuntu's Mir

Written by Michael Larabel in Ubuntu on 14 July 2016 at 02:03 PM EDT. 43 Comments
UBUNTU
Back in February when Vulkan launched as the new Khronos graphics API, Ubuntu developers planned to have Vulkan support in Mir by Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. That didn't happen and since then it has kept getting pushed back.

While back in May it looked like Vulkan support would soon be done for Mir, that hasn't happened yet even though we're half-way through the development cycle now for Ubuntu 16.10 Yakkety Yak.

The Launchpad bug report tracking Vulkan support for the Mir display server keeps getting pushed back. Originally the target was for Mir 0.20 and since then it's slipped release-by-release.

Last week that bug report was updated by Canonical's Kevin DuBois to reflect that Vulkan isn't a target for Mir 0.24 but now is pushed back to at least v0.25. Of course, no guarantee that the feature will be ready for Mir 0.25.

The 0.25 milestone page shows 20 other bugs/requests currently being targeted for this next version of Mir. Hopefully the Vulkan support will be ready in time for Ubuntu 16.10, albeit it's not the biggest priority considering the lack of Linux games currently using this alternative to OpenGL, especially anything relevant to Ubuntu Phone, and that the Yakkety Yak will still be using Unity 7 + X.Org by default on the desktop.
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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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