Vulkan (new 3D graphics driver API) packages

Jacek Konieczny jajcus at jajcus.net
Sat Feb 20 18:00:22 CET 2016


Hi,

Last week Khronos Group released the Vulkan-1.0 specification and some
basic Vulkan software (SDK). First drivers and apps has also been
released.

Vulkan is the new 3D Graphics API which is hoped to be much better than
OpenGL.

Unfortunately the released SDK is complete mess. The 'official package'
is a self-extracting archive, compiled from multiple source repositories
and containing some deb packages. It is not suitable for PLD packaging.
Instead, I have packaged code from the individual GitHub repositories.
Those are also mess: unreasonable names, no proper versioning or release
tags, binaries would install in quite random locations, if at all…

That is why package naming and versioning is a bit of guess work now. We
should probably sync it with upstream, when they clean up the mess a
bit.

I have packaged the 'Vulkan-LoaderAndValidationLayers' with its
dependencies and the experimental Mesa driver for Intel GPUs.

The packages:

vulkan-loader.spec:

     vulkan-loader (that is package name of the DEB pkg in the official
SDK) – the main API entry point – libvulkan.so plus directories for the
ICDs (drivers) and layers (optional middleware)

     vulkan-loader-utils – currently only 'vulkaninfo'

     vulkan-layers – validation layers

     vulkan-devel – Vulkan header files + exaples (demo code)

     vulkan-loader-demos - precompiled demos (won't run outside of the
source directory, ackaged in -devel, though)

This is built from the latest tag on the repository and uses the Vulkan
SDK version number.

Mesa-vulkan-icd-intel.spec:

     Mesa-vulkan-icd-intel – Vulkan driver for intel GPUs

This is built from a snapshot of the 'vulkan' branch of Mesa GIT
repository. Will be built from Mesa spec, when mainstreamed.

The driver should work for Skylake GPUs and support for earlier chips
(like Haswell based HD4600) is incomplete and known to be buggy. Thats
why little more than 'vulkaninfo' works for me. Only
https://github.com/krh/vkcube would display anything for me, but only
when forced to link against our loader and the intel driver library (the
latter should never be needed).

The newest nVidia GPU Linux drivers include Vulkan support – someone
with that GPU should try package that too. There is even a chance that
someone would be able to play The Talos Principle on Vulkan with that.

AMD is late, as always…

Jacek


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