Intel's Vulkan Linux Driver Lands Timeline Semaphore Support

A change to look forward to with Mesa 20.0 due out next quarter is Vulkan timeline semaphore support (VK_KHR_timeline_semaphore) for Intel's "ANV" open-source driver.

Vulkan timeline semaphore support is the latest synchronization model for the Vulkan graphics API and building upon earlier primitives. The Vulkan Timeline Semaphore extends VkSemaphore and supports signal/wait from host threads, better platform support, a monotonically increasing counter than can be used for more descriptive purposes, and other design improvements.

VK_KHR_timeline_semaphore has been available since Vulkan 1.1.124. Mesa 19.3 has the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan support while now for next quarter's Mesa 20.0 feature release is the Intel ANV support.

The Intel support was merged on Monday to Mesa Git. More details on the Vulkan Timeline Semaphore support via this slide deck (PDF) by NVIDIA's James Jones.