Talvos: A SPIR-V Interpreter & Vulkan Device Emulator For Debugging

Another interesting Vulkan open-source project worthy of a shout-out is Talvos, a dynamic analysis framework and debugger for Vulkan and SPIR-V programs.

Talvos consists of a SPIR-V interpreter and Vulkan device emulator in an effort to assist in debugging Vulkan programs without needing source-level modifications as well as in debugging the SPIR-V intermediate representation.

This BSD-licensed debugger/emulator is currently focusing upon compute shader debugging and is already working with handling SPIR-V shaders generated by Clspv for taking OpenCL to Vulkan.

This Linux/macOS/Windows debugger can work with Vulkan applications by simply linking against. There is also talvos-cmd as an emulator interface that supports interactive debugging / step-by-step execution of SPIR-V shaders.

Those wishing to learn more about Talvos can do so via the GitHub repository and the documentation site. At the moment Talvos development is being led by James Price out of the University of Bristol.