ADriConf GUI Control Panel Support For Mesa Vulkan Drivers Is Brought Up

One of the most frequent complaints we hear from Linux gamers running open-source GPU drivers is over the lack of the hardware vendors supporting any feature-rich control panels like they do on Windows. There are many Linux driver tunables exposed by these open-source graphics drivers, but often they can only be manipulated via command-line options, environment variables, boot parameters, and other less than straight-forward means especially for recent converts from Windows and other novice Linux users. ADriConf has been doing a fairly decent job as a third-party means of helping to improve the situation and now there is talk of it supporting Vulkan driver settings.

ADriConf is the "Advanced DRI Configurator" and is the more maintained and featureful version than the traditional DriConf. But it's still not something Windows users would be envious about (more screenshots here):

It's been doing a best effort job though considering the limited resources and Intel nor AMD investing much effort in this area of GUI driver control panels.

Jean Hertel who has been leading the ADriConf work has now inquired about supporting Mesa's Vulkan drivers in a new Mesa discussion. While the OpenGL drivers have GLX and EGL extensions for exposing driver configuration tunables, unfortunately, for Vulkan drivers there doesn't appear to be any extension at this point for uniformally exposing driver options / driver configuration data. So for ADriConf to support Mesa Vulkan drivers it could be a long road ahead with first needing to get through a new Vulkan extension for driver-specific configuration querying otherwise relying upon static lists of per-driver options within the program itself. Hopefully 2020 will bring more positive news on the Linux driver GUI control panel front.