AMDVLK Updated With Wayland Support, Many Other Fixes & Improvements

Written by Michael Larabel in Radeon on 29 March 2018 at 05:55 AM EDT. 5 Comments
RADEON
With it having been two weeks since AMD last updated their PAL/AMDVLK source tree, today's update contains a fair amount of changes to this official open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan Linux driver.

Most notable from this latest whopping of +10,184 lines of new code (and 8,990 deletions) is Wayland support! AMDVLK should now be able to work with Vulkan on native Wayland environments. AMDVLK needed a fair amount of additions for supporting surfaces on Wayland and its window management/integration differences.

Also significant with this code drop is moving the pipeline and user-data binding to draw-time, which AMD developers found improved performance in some games/applications with "nice gains" as a result of this change. There doesn't appear to be any workloads that regressed but worst case scenario was the same performance.

The AMDVLK driver's PAL Linux VA manager should also now support multiple devices, a number of fixes concerning Vega/GFX9, and then a number of other bug fixes throughout this massive driver code-base.

Those wanting to try out the AMDVLK Linux Vulkan driver can find the instructions here. Given the possible performance optimizations in this release, it looks like it will be on my TODO list soon for some fresh benchmarks against RADV from Mesa 18.1-dev.
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