Autodesk Contributes Mesa Vulkan WSI Support For Apple's Metal

An interesting merge request opened this week and already merged for Mesa 24.3 comes from an Autodesk engineer adding Vulkan Windowing System Integration (WSI) around Apple's Metal API for use on macOS.

Aleksi Sapon of Autodesk contributed WSI Metal support to Mesa. The intent here is on better leveraging Mesa's Lavapipe Vulkan software implementation atop Apple macOS systems. Unfortunately no Vulkan hardware driver magic for use on macOS -- for that there is MoltenVK for routing Vulkan API to Metal.

Sapon explained in the Mesa merge request:

Implement WSI Metal support for macOS. Based on the headless and Win32 implementations. Implements the core functionality.

This takes advantage of unified memory on Apple devices to directly blit the CPU image to the surface, using a "no copy" buffer interpreted as a texture.

The code was merged today for Mesa 24.3. Autodesk dabbling with Vulkan on macOS shouldn't come as too much of a surprise as even all the way back to 2021 Autodesk began exploring MoltenVK use.