PanVK Pulls Back From Advertising Vulkan 1.1 For Now

Panfrost's PanVK Vulkan driver for Arm Mali graphics hardware had been exposing Vulkan API 1.1 support but that was premature and has now been reverted to Vulkan 1.0.

Jason Ekstrand has been working on the PanVK driver recently and yesterday merged the change to stop advertising Vulkan 1.1 for PanVK and fall back to Vulkan 1.0. He explained, "We're nowhere close to even having Vulkan 1.0 working yet, there's no reason to get too excited about 1.1. It just means piles more test crashes for features we're claiming to support but don't. If we want to enable more tests, we can turn on the extensions for those features once we actually have them working."

Eventually PanVK will properly expose Vulkan 1.1 and beyond but for now faking it just means just conformance test suite crashes. In any case this driver for open-source Arm Mali Vulkan support has been progressing quite nicely in recent times with this latest activity going into Mesa 22.1 for debut in the Q2 Mesa3D release.