Raspberry Pi "V3DV" Open-Source Driver Closing In On Vulkan 1.2

It was just last October that Mesa's V3DV driver achieved Vulkan 1.1 conformance for this Broadcom Vulkan open-source driver most notably used by the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer. Now Vulkan 1.2 is just on the horizon.

It looks like the V3DV Mesa driver will soon be crossing the threshold of Vulkan 1.2 support and again will be pursuing official Vulkan CTS conformance with The Khronos Group.

Iago Toral of consulting firm Igalia that has been working with the Raspberry Pi gang on this Vulkan driver relayed the good news. A test run with Vulkan 1.2 exposed has been carried out on the Raspberry Pi 4 and it "went surprisingly well" with just a few test failures.

Soon they are hoping to be able to submit their V3DV Vulkan 1.2 conformance test suite results once working out the few remaining issues.

The Raspberry Pi 4 in a CooliPi 4B.

There are also some optional Vulkan 1.2 features to be looked at including those around descriptor indexing and shader float16 int8. However, the optional buffer device address extension can't be supported without hacks due to the Broadcom V3D GPU only supporting 32-bit addresses and not any 64-bit values as defined by the spec. There are also a number of other optional extensions that can't be implemented for lack of hardware support.

More details on this upcoming Raspberry Pi Vulkan driver milestone via the Igalia blog.