Wine Developers Determining How To Handle Vulkan Loader Support

While this week's Wine 3.4 release delivers on working Wine Vulkan ICD support for beginning to allow Windows Vulkan programs to work under Wine assuming the host has Vulkan API support, this current implementation still requires the user to install the Windows Vulkan SDK.

At the moment those wanting to use Windows Vulkan games/applications under Wine still need to download the LunarG Vulkan SDK for Windows in order to obtain the Vulkan loader (DLL) for pairing with Wine's Vulkan ICD driver.

The official Vulkan loader isn't currently bundled within Wine as last year The Khronos Group switched this loader code from being BSD licensed to now under an Apache license. Wine developers would much prefer the loader be BSD licensed than under the Apache. To potentially avoid any code license disturbances, they could also punt the Windows Vulkan loader installation to the user similar to how Wine's Gecko/Mono support is downloaded and installed separately.

An alternative to using the Khronos' Vulkan loader, Roderick Colenbrander is considering writing their own minimal vulkan-1.dll loader library that would be rather basic like skip out on supporting Vulkan layers or handling multiple ICD drivers. Roderick previously hacked on such a very basic library but it would be just that: quite a basic implementation.

So far the developers aren't sure the approach they will go with for easing the Wine Vulkan support, but it can be discussed on wine-devel for those curious or wanting to voice an opinion.