Intel's Vulkan Driver Merged Into Mainline Mesa

Just as planned, the Vulkan code has been merged into mainline Mesa.

Jason Ekstrand of Intel who has been leading the company's Linux Vulkan driver efforts went ahead and merged the code-base into mainline Mesa Git master on Friday afternoon. This means the Intel Vulkan driver will be appearing in the next stable release in about three months. That release is currently known as Mesa 11.3 but could very well become Mesa 12.0 if core Mesa achieves a new OpenGL 4 support level.

This Vulkan code merged is currently just for the Intel driver. In best shape right now are newer generations of Intel hardware like Broadwell and Skylake, but even still various kinks are still being worked through in this new driver code. In the future perhaps we'll see a Nouveau Vulkan driver based on this Mesa implementation as well as the capable ARM hardware drivers, etc. On the red side, AMD's current Vulkan Linux driver is binary-only (I still haven't heard any word yet when they'll try making it open-source, besides the "future") and isn't based upon a Mesa/Gallium3D design.