Intel Skylake Vulkan Support Appears To Be Working Out Pretty Well

Taking a break from all my NVIDIA Vulkan Linux testing, I decided to install the Intel Anvil Vulkan driver on my main Fedora system this morning for taking the Skylake support for a test drive.

In case you missed it from yesterday, there was an article with the Intel Vulkan Linux driver details. Intel's open-source Vulkan driver approach for Linux is based upon Mesa but not going the Gallium3D route and as the developers said not much of their new code could be shared easily to other drivers, at least not those using the NIR intermediate representation.

Unlike the NVIDIA Vulkan Linux driver that still uses their libGL.so.1 library for Vulkan support, the Intel Mesa Vulkan support yields a new libVK_anv.so library that's loaded for the Vulkan 1.0.3 compliance.

In case you missed the Fedora message about their Vulkan support, see this message by Red Hat's Adam Jackson. Setting up the Intel Vulkan Linux driver on Fedora is as easy as:

$ sudo dnf copr enable ajax/vulkan
$ sudo dnf install vulkan anvil vkcube

Plus you'll also need to ensure you are using DRI3 rendering rather than the default DRI2.

I was doing some quick tests this morning from my main workstation, which is running F23 and using a Core i5 6500 Skylake processor.

Vulkaninfo immediately reported back with success. The vulkaninfo command is to Vulkan as glxinfo is to GLX/OpenGL and as clinfo is to OpenCL.

Vkcube also fired up without issues. vkcube is like the glxgears of the Vulkan world ;)

So far, so good. The Fedora Copr repository makes it extremely easy to play with the latest Intel Vulkan support.

One of the early woes encountered have been resizing any Vulkan windows will usually result in problems. I've also had this happen with Vulkan demos on the NVIDIA Linux driver too.

Stay tuned for more Vulkan Linux tests shortly.