RADV Vulkan Driver Is Prepping For Vega/GFX9 Support

It looks like RADV developers are working on getting their driver ready for bringing up Radeon RX Vega support on their unofficial, open-source Vulkan driver.

David Airlie sent out a series of patches today to "realign some code in advance of GFX9". GFX9 is the internal codename for the Radeon RX Vega's graphics processor. The four patches are relatively small and just refactoring some code ahead of RADV's Vega support. The patch series is on Mesa-dev but is not too exciting by itself.

It will be interesting to see how the RADV Vega support comes and if AMD is providing early Vega access or documentation to Airlie for bringing up any support in this (unofficial) driver, if he's just basing his work off the Vega changes to the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver, or is simply waiting for the GPUs to physically launch. RADV remains not officially backed by AMD while they appear to remain committed to their currently proprietary multi-platform Vulkan driver with plans to eventually open-source their existing Vulkan driver. However, there is still no word on when this Vulkan open-sourcing might finally happen... Back when Vulkan 1.0 debuted there was talk of "six months or so", but that's blown past with no further briefing.

Radeon RX Vega is launching at the end of July so we can hope that by then maybe we'll see AMD's open-source Vulkan driver or if RADV will beat them to the punch in supporting GFX9.