Vulkan SC 1.0 Coming For "Safety Critical" Graphics / Compute

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Vulkan SC 1.0 Coming For "Safety Critical" Graphics / Compute

It's been over two years since The Khronos Group acknowledged they were working on safety critical Vulkan and now finally the 1.0 provisional release is approaching for this graphics/compute interface suitable for safety critical systems...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Vulkan-SC-1.0-Coming

[ddriver]

Does "safety critical" graphics really need to be fancy hardware accelerated eye candy gimmickry?

It seems such usage scenarios could do with something far more basic and simple, and therefore stable.

[skeevy420]

Does "safety critical" graphics really need to be fancy hardware accelerated eye candy gimmickry?

It seems such usage scenarios could do with something far more basic and simple, and therefore stable.

Yes.

The alternative is your car crashes because your game crashed because DKVK crashed because you were playing Cyberpunk in your Tesla using self-driving instead of driving yourself.

[ddriver]

Yes.

The alternative is your car crashes because your game crashed because DKVK crashed because you were playing Cyberpunk in your Tesla using self-driving instead of driving yourself.

I am pretty sure they use different dedicated devices for drive assistance and entertainment...

[chocolate]

Does "safety critical" graphics really need to be fancy hardware accelerated eye candy gimmickry?

It seems such usage scenarios could do with something far more basic and simple, and therefore stable.

I've seen embedded systems with a bunch of lines drawn by a DSP as part of video processing that were way, way farther from stability than a relatively modern system using OpenGL on an ARM GPU. What gets written by talented engineers and coders will eventually resemble something stable if given reasonable resources, otherwise not, regardless of the underlying technology.

Also, yes, you do need such APIs to be able to use potent hardware that in itself lets you scale to higher resolutions and so on.

[timofonic]

Another important aspect of Vulkan SC is making the test suite even more rigid. The Vulkan Conformance Test Suite (CTS) is already quite verbose and much better than what was available with graphics API test suites from years ago, but the Vulkan SC 1.0 Conformance Test Suite will be even more robust and ensuring extensive coverage of API compatibility, safety certification compliance, and more that becomes necessary in safety critical environments.

This should be done to vanilla Vulkan too...

[Teggs]

I am pretty sure they use different dedicated devices for drive assistance and entertainment...

I would like to think so, but this is a company which designs vehicles that are hackable over wireless connections, so...

[skeevy420]

I am pretty sure they use different dedicated devices for drive assistance and entertainment...

Like Teggs I'd like to think that too but I wouldn't be surprised if everything is running off the AMD APU or that there's enough interconnectivity that a crash from one system will effect the others.

[microcode]

Does "safety critical" graphics really need to be fancy hardware accelerated eye candy gimmickry?

It seems such usage scenarios could do with something far more basic and simple, and therefore stable.

While that may be the case, there is no real reason we should forbid high performance accelerated graphics if it can be made reliable in an environment like a gauge cluster or avionics display, and there are cases where it could be useful and help with the cause of safety (e.g. accurate terrain projection). These SC versions of these APIs enforce hygienic allocations, like you would see in other safety critical systems like ECUs; so at the end of the day the number and severity of faults is much less in these systems. You of course get added benefits of this hygiene if your programming environment strictly enforces memory boundaries (e.g. Rust).

[piorunz]

So it's will be like Debian Oldstable but in 3D world.