Mesa Git Now Allows Building The Open-Source AMD RADV Vulkan Driver On Windows

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mesa Git Now Allows Building The Open-Source AMD RADV Vulkan Driver On Windows

You may recall last year was work that got started on being able to compile the open-source Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver on Windows. Well, this Friday the merge request finally was honored for Mesa 21.2...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mesa-Build-RADV-On-Windows

[schmidtbag]

This would be very interesting, not only to compare the performance between Linux and Windows, but also between the closed-source Windows drivers.

[ms178]

The ability to compile it with more agressive compiler flags with MSVC might come into the mix, too. But I'd like to see it actually work better first than AMD's own solution before I start any experiments myself.

[user1]

To be able to actually run RADV on Windows, someone will have to write a new winsys backend for it for communication with the Windows kernel driver. I kinda doubt someone is willing to do that. I'm still curious what is the purpose of compiling RADV on Windows.
Speaking of actually running a Mesa driver on WIndows, I think it would make much more sense with RadeonSI, considering the poor performance of the WIndows GL driver.

[nadro]

This would be very interesting, not only to compare the performance between Linux and Windows, but also between the closed-source Windows drivers.

You can build this driver on Windows, but nothing more. It's related to cross-compile.

[uid313]

Pretty cool, I would hope to see other drivers such as the Mesa Intel and Nvidia be available for Windows too.

Hopefully we can see some Mesa contributions from some Windows developers too that don't use Linux but ends up benefiting Mesa on Linux. I remember back in the days there was a hacked AMD and Nvidia driver on Windows called Omega. It was AMD and Nvidia's offcial drivers, but some guy had hacked them and patched them to improve them.

[VoodaGod]

If someone got radv running on windows, could we theoretically run games with dxvk through wine on wsl on open source drivers?

[darkbasic]

I would love to see it actually running on Windows!

[cb88]

To be able to actually run RADV on Windows, someone will have to write a new winsys backend for it for communication with the Windows kernel driver. I kinda doubt someone is willing to do that. I'm still curious what is the purpose of compiling RADV on Windows.
Speaking of actually running a Mesa driver on WIndows, I think it would make much more sense with RadeonSI, considering the poor performance of the WIndows GL driver.

The winsys is already there... MESA already runs on windows in software mode. What is not there is the XDDM/WDDM part of the hardware driver, which would be roughly equivalent to libdrm and radeonsi. It would be cool to fork mesa and backport to XDDM also just for kicks and retrochallenge type stuff (we were promised vulkan on XP but it never happened).

This is a little muddled but the *windows* specific part of stuff is there... you just need to get the hardware specific stuff in also.

It would further be cool for this to run on ReactOS but that would either imply ReactOS needs to implement WDDM, or the driver would need to be XDDM (win2k/XP driver).

[zexelon]

The march towards the Winux distro continues!