Vulkan Working On New Timeline Semaphores Feature

You may have remembered when the XDC2018 agenda was published there was "Untitled Vulkan break-out kick-off. Topic still under NDA." We now know what that was about.

Jason Ekstrand of Intel's open-source Vulkan driver team just wrapped up presenting at XDC2018 in Spain where the topic ended up being Vulkan Timeline Semaphores.

Vulkan Timeline Semaphores is being worked on by The Khronos Group and the Vulkan Working Group as a new synchronization programming model. This is intended to help improve the synchronization process for rendering and work out better for game developers based on feedback from the existing Vulkan semaphores functionality.

The specification on this timeline semaphore functionality has yet to be published, but Ekstrand was presenting an initial overview of it and the focus this week at XDC2018 is on trying to come up with a cross-driver kernel interface for supporting the necessary functionality by the Linux DRM drivers -- namely Intel and Radeon. Tomorrow will be a break-out session where the developers involved will try to hash out a capable interface and other common areas for the implementation.

Will update when slides and video recording become available.