Intel Publishes 56 Patches For Conformant Vulkan 1.1 Support With ANV Driver

Intel has joined the party with NVIDIA and AMD in offering launch-day Linux driver support for the big new Vulkan 1.1 update available today from The Khronos Group.

Two years ago and a month when Vulkan 1.0 first debuted, it was dramatic that Intel was able to deliver launch-day, open-source driver support with what would be dubbed the "ANV" driver. Now with this first major post-1.0 Vulkan update, Intel open-source developers have stuck to delivering support in-step with the revised specification from Khronos. It's another miracle if you think how years ago the Mesa drivers would trail Khronos OpenGL updates by months or even years... We're still waiting on full mainline Mesa support for OpenGL 4.6. But today we have Vulkan 1.1 patches that the Intel developers say are conformant with this revised graphics/compute specification.

This ANV Vulkan driver support continues targeting Broadwell "Gen 8" graphics hardware and newer.

The implementation is considered nearly feature complete except for 16-bit shader I/O still being in the works. Also, in order to have this Vulkan 1.1 support you must be on the Linux 4.14 kernel or newer due to the synchronization object wait ioctl.

Intel is already planning on merging the 56 patches as soon as this afternoon. This Vulkan 1.1 support will be there for the Mesa 18.1 release due next quarter but sadly not in time for the imminent Mesa 18.0 release.

In terms of the impact for adding Vulkan 1.1 support to ANV while building off their existing work, 74 files changed, 13667 insertions(+), 9118 deletions(-).