Older Radeon GPUs With RADV Vulkan Driver Now Have Trap Handler For Helping Catch Issues

The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has seen an initial trap handler implementation for helping to more easily catch and diagnose various issues stemming from Vulkan shaders.

Initially for AMD "GFX8" Fiji/Polaris graphics processors but should theoretically work as well for older GFX6/GFX7 hardware is the trap handler merged on Monday. Newer GFX9/GFX10 GPUs will require a separate trap handler implementation due to hardware differences.

The RADV trap handler will help in diagnosing different issues with useful debug information provided. This can be used for problems like video memory violations, divide by zero errors, and similar issues.

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve worked on this initial GFX8 trap handler for RADV. The trap handler isn't enabled by default but requires the RADV_TRAP_HANDLER=1 environment variable be set prior to firing up your Vulkan games/applications for debugging.

More details on the trap handler via this honored merge request now residing within Mesa 20.3.