Early Progress Made On Porting Radeon Vulkan Driver To BeOS-Inspired Haiku OS

After successfully getting Mesa's software-based Lavapipe Vulkan implementation building on Haiku last month along with related Mesa code for headless support, a developer independent of AMD has started work on porting the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" to Haiku.

Haiku developer "X512" has been spending the past number of weeks so far trying to get the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver stack working on this BeOS-inspired platform. This would be the first major Vulkan driver working for Haiku though there is also interest in getting the open-source Intel Vulkan driver working there too.

Much of the Mesa code should be able to work unchanged for Haiku as Mesa and Haiku can already work for OpenGL rendering. However, much of the work comes down to needing a working Direct Rendering Manager kernel driver for the GPU support and changes to the shim / libdrm code for interfacing between the kernel and user-space. The developer X512 as part of this effort has been working out some of his own libdrm implementation and other changes on the road to hopefully getting accelerated AMD Radeon Vulkan driver support on this niche platform.

Those interested in the ongoing work from first getting Lavapipe code running to now the Radeon Vulkan focus can see this Haiku-OS.org discussion thread documenting the progress and challenges.