AMDVLK Vulkan Driver Stack Gets Updated With More Extensions, Optimizations & Fixes

Written by Michael Larabel in Radeon on 21 April 2018 at 01:14 PM EDT. 3 Comments
RADEON
AMD developers maintaining their official Vulkan cross-platform driver code have pushed their end-of-week updates to their external source repositories for those wanting to build the AMDVLK driver on Linux from source.

This latest AMDVLK push updates not only their PAL (Platform Abstraction Layer) and XGL (Vulkan API Layer) components but it also updates their fork of the LLVM code-base used for their shader compilation.

The LLVM branch continues to carry various fixes and improvements atop the Radeon Open eCosystem project's fork of the LLVM repository, which in turn is tracking upstream. Hopefully more of these Radeon Open eCosystem and AMDVLK LLVM changes will get upstreamed in the future to make it easier for building the driver against mainline LLVM. The latest LLVM branched code provides some fixes pertaining to the Radeon support.

On the latest PAL update is enabling synchronization object fence support, expanded reporting to the logger, SYNC_FD type handling for KHR_EXTERNAL_SEMAPHORE_FD, and other changes.

Over on the XGL side there is now support for the VK_AMD_gcn_shader and VK_AMD_shader_image_load_store_lod extensions. The proprietary driver build has supported the GCN shader extension for a while and RADV recently picked it up too, so it's a bit surprising it's taken this long for XGL to enable it in their source tree. The XGL updates also now implement the SYNC_FD handle type for semaphores and external fences, sub-group arithmetic operations, optimizations for sub-groups, and various fixes among other changes.
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