LibreOffice 7 Continues Plumbing Its Vulkan Rendering Support

Written by Michael Larabel in LibreOffice on 19 February 2020 at 06:52 AM EST. 11 Comments
LIBREOFFICE
Landing last November in the LibreOffice development code was Skia drawing support to replace Cairo and in turn that opens up for Vulkan rendering of this cross-platform, open-source office suite.

Skia+Vulkan is working out for LibreOffice and in fact the debut version that was going to be LibreOffice 6.5 was renamed to LibreOffice 7.0 as the current version now under development following the recent LibreOffice 6.4 release.

The LibreOffice 7.0 Alpha release is expected to happen already in early May while by the end of that month will be the feature freeze and branching. Betas and release candidates will happen through the summer while ideally LibreOffice 7.0.0 will debut the first full week of August.

The Vulkan work for LibreOffice 7.0 has been ongoing and a few more improvements were merged over the past week. The latest happenings include Vulkan context creation for Windows after that code was mistakenly left out until a few days ago. Also added is Vulkan blacklisting support and sharing the OpenGL blacklist file handling with Skia/Vulkan.

The good news is that while the plumbing is added for allowing LibreOffice to blacklist buggy Vulkan drivers, so far there are not any Vulkan configurations being black-listed by the office suite. The SAL_SKIA=vulkan environment variable for forcing Vulkan support is also wired up in the latest LibreOffice activity. There is also new options added to the UI for forcing Skia's CPU-based rasterizing.

It's great seeing this Vulkan+Skia support come together quickly for LibreOffice 7.0 and that it should be set to sail by this August.
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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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