AMD's GPUOpen Has Opened The Window System Agent Library

Written by Michael Larabel in Radeon on 15 April 2018 at 07:18 AM EDT. Add A Comment
RADEON
As part of the AMDVLK/XGL/PAL driver stack is now the WSA library.

AMD's open-source developers maintaining their official Vulkan driver put out the source this week to WSA, the Window System Agent. WSA encapsulates windowing system details and basically serves as an abstraction layer so that e.g. AMDVLK can simply target WSA and doesn't need to deal with the underlying windowing system details itself.

For now the Window System Agent just supports Wayland. The newly-opened WSA code can be found in this new GitHub repo along with other basic information on this component. While most projects have now settled upon Wayland being the future of the Linux desktop, having the WSA source out there could help others with porting AMDVLK to working on other niche windowing systems.

As a refresher on the other AMDVLK (AMD Vulkan Driver) terminology, XGL is the AMD Vulkan API layer to translate Vulkan into PAL commands using LLPC, the LLVM Pipeline Compiler. PAL is the Platform Abstraction Layer for hardware/OS abstractions for Radeon GPUs. PAL isn't just for Vulkan but also used by the other official Radeon drivers on Windows too.
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