Intel Vulkan Driver Now Dumps More To EXT_debug_report, Used By VKpipeline-DB

The latest work within Mesa 19.1 is for the Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver and that is dumping more shader information within the VK_EXT_debug_report extension. The output of that is then used by the Mesa developers' VKpipeline-DB utility for offline analysis.

VK_EXT_debug_report is the Vulkan extension for being able to enable error/debug reporting between Vulkan applications/games and the drivers. The debug reporting extension can reveal various information bits useful in debugging crashes and areas for optimization. With the new Mesa Git there is support in the Intel open-source Vulkan Linux driver for dumping shader information with this extension.

That dumped information can then be run through the vkpipeline-db utility that is worked on by both the Intel and Radeon Mesa developers. vkpipeline-db is similar to the OpenGL shader-db utility for capturing and replaying graphics/compute pipelines for obtaining shader performance statistics. This utility has made use of VK_AMD_shader_info while now VK_EXT_debug_report integration is being worked on. Details on this utility can be found via Gitlab.

Long story short, this work will help in the long run with vkpipeline-db for evaluating driver changes in the future on their Vulkan shader performance.