AMD Developer Posts More Patches For RADV

The state of the open-source RADV Vulkan driver remains rather murky with it not officially being supported by AMD while the company continues to back its still-proprietary multi-platform Vulkan driver with no signs of when it may be open-sourced, but an AMD developer posted some fresh RADV patches today.

More than one year past the Vulkan launch and when AMD debuted its Vulkan driver, which at the time they mentioned the possibility of it being open-sourced within six months or so, we haven't seen that big code drop reached yet. Meanwhile, the RADV driver within Mesa continues getting better with developers from Red Hat, Google, and others contributing to it. The performance is still improving, but they recently crossed the milestone of effectively being Vulkan 1.0 compliant. While with AMD's Vulkan driver it's compliant but they haven't dropped the code yet, is not integrated with Mesa but expected to be its own standalone repository, and we don't know much more yet about their grand plans.

But it's interesting waking up today seeing 15 more patches from AMD's Nicolai Hähnle to RADV. These 15 patches to RADV range from fixes to making use of more shared/common code with RadeonSI Gallium3D. These latest patches can be found on Mesa-dev. The patches were signed-off using Nicolai's AMD email address as opposed to his personal email. It's not very common seeing AMD contributing to this unofficial Vulkan driver, but maybe they are changing their Vulkan Linux path? Hopefully we'll get some more clear communication or action soon. Just a pity how long it's taken AMD with their open-source Vulkan ambitions.