Keith Packard Continues Working On DRM Leases For Vulkan / Linux VR

Keith Packard has published another update on his work around DRM leases and his objective of improving the open-source driver stack for SteamVR / Linux VR.

The main area he's been working on is DRM leases for VR HMDs. His latest blog post concerns work on Vulkan's EXT_display_control, DRM integration, etc.

He comments in the blog post, "At this point, all of the necessary pieces are in place for the VR application to take advantage of an HMD using only existing Vulkan extensions. Those will be automatically mapped into DRM leases and DRM events as appropriate. The VR compositor application is working pretty well; tests with Dota 2 show occasional jerky behavior in complex scenes, so there's clearly more work to be done somewhere. I need to go write a pile of tests to independently verify that my code is working. I wonder if I'll need to wire up some kind of light sensor so I can actually tell when frames get displayed as it's pretty easy to get consistent-but-wrong answers in this environment."

Those wishing to try out his work will need for now branched versions of the Linux kernel, X.Org Server, RandR, XCB, libdrm, and Mesa.