Mesa Git Now Allows Building The Open-Source AMD RADV Vulkan Driver On Windows

You may recall last year was work that got started on being able to compile the open-source Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver on Windows. Well, this Friday the merge request finally was honored for Mesa 21.2.

That eight month old merge request is to allow compiling the RADV Vulkan driver with ACO compiler back-end on Microsoft Windows. It doesn't yet though make RADV on Windows usable as an alternative to AMD's Radeon Software Vulkan driver for Windows.

The merge request consists of code changes for being able to build the code with Visual Studio / the MSVC compiler. Plus it also adds RADV building on Windows to the Mesa continuous integration setup so that it will be tested moving forward as well.

See this merge request for the details.

It will be interesting to see what ultimately happens and if/when RADV is able to actually work on Windows and whether it can possess any interesting advantages compared to the existing proprietary AMD Vulkan Windows driver.