Mesa "Vallium" - Software/CPU-Based Vulkan Based On LLVMpipe

While there has been the CPU-based "Kazan" Vulkan driver (formerly Vulkan-CPU as a Google Summer of Code project) and Google's SwiftShader has been implementing CPU-based Vulkan support, it turns out Red Hat's David Airlie has been working on a Mesa/Gallium3D-inspired Vulkan software renderer.

Airlie has been working on a software Vulkan stack based on Mesa's LLVMpipe driver, the Gallium3D driver allowing OpenGL to run on CPUs and leveraging LLVM. This new software Vulkan implementation has been going under the "Vallium" naming, as in Vulkan Gallium.

Talos Principle running on a software vulkan stack based on Mesa's llvmpipe. #Vulkan @TalosPrinciple @VulkanAPI pic.twitter.com/WUYoExJuun

— David Airlie (@DaveAirlie) April 23, 2020

Airlie tweeted on Thursday that his Vulkan software stack is now good enough to run The Talos Principle with Vulkan, albeit don't expect it to compete with the GPU performance or really be playable aside from possibly on the highest-end CPUs.

Vallium is currently being developed on his personal Mesa branch under not-a-vulkan-swrast-3.

It will be interesting to see how well Vallium matures over the weeks/months ahead. With Mesa 20.1 hitting its feature freeze in the next few days, it's quite unlikely seeing it land for this quarter's stable series but perhaps we'll see if it tries to aim for inclusion in Mesa 20.2 for August. Given that it's already working with The Talos Principle, Vallium is showing quite some potential.