Intel ANV Driver Gets Patches For VK_KHX_external_memory Extensions

Now that Vulkan's external memory patches are now public with today's Vulkan 1.0.42 big update, the Intel ANV open-source Vulkan driver is getting ready to roll out their support for their new extensions.

Within Mesa Git already they've updated the registry and headers for v1.0.42 as well as advertising the new driver version but they don't yet implement the new 1.0.42 extensions.

Jason Ekstrand has published a set of seven patches on Mesa-dev for implementing the VK_KHX_external_memory extensions. These new extensions are important for VR although current Intel graphics hardware isn't quite capable of powering a Linux VR gaming system.

The patches include VK_KHX_external_memory, VK_KHX_external_memory_capabilities, and VK_KHX_external_memory_fd. It's less than 300 lines of new code for wiring in the external memory extensions, which is fundamentally used so a game/application can export non-Vulkan handles from Vulkan memory objects and so they can be referenced outside of the scope of the Vulkan logical device.

But with this patch series, Ekstrand is also kicking off the discussion whether this work should land in Mesa Git yet. The "KHX" identifier on the extensions denote it's currently an experimental extension and thus there may be differing views whether the work should be allowed in Mesa Git master or if it should wait until Khronos has ratified these extensions as stable.

Update: There are also now patches available for KHR_push_descriptor and KHR_descriptor_update_template.