RADV Seeing Early Experimenting With Vulkan Video Capabilities

As another "first on RADV" for this Mesa Radeon Vulkan open-source driver compared to AMD's official Vulkan Linux driver options, there is an early branch providing primitive, experimental support for Vulkan Video acceleration.

Earlier this year the Vulkan Video extensions were published in provisional form. When it comes to Linux support so far there has just been the NVIDIA Vulkan beta driver exposing the video extensions, but now with a branched, not-yet-mainlined set of patches there is initial RADV support too.

Red Hat's David Airlie has been experimenting with Vulkan Video for RADV. Airlie isn't a video acceleration expert or even that familiar with video processing, but thanks to the open-source RadeonSI VA-API driver and his GPU expertise, he was able to sort things out to get some working code.

With some sample NVIDIA video decoder code for Vulkan Video, he has been able to verify his early working code for H.264 decoding using Vulkan Video -- albeit with the possibility of hangs and other shortcomings in its current form.

This very early RADV Vulkan Video code is being developed in the radv-vulkan-video-prelim-decode branch.

More details on Airlie's blog. It will be interesting to see where this code ends up and if it can mature enough to be mainlined in Mesa prior to seeing AMD provide any official Vulkan Video support in their PRO driver or AMDVLK.