Intel's Shiny Vulkan Overlay Layer Lands In Mesa 19.1 - Provides A HUD With Driver Stats

As some more exciting open-source Intel Linux graphics news this week besides their new merge request to mainline the Iris Gallium3D driver, over in the Vulkan space they have merged today their overlay layer that provides a heads-up display of sorts for their Linux "ANV" driver.

Last month we reported on Intel developing a Vulkan "heads-up display" for their driver to display various statistics to help the driver developers themselves as well as application/game developers. This is akin to Gallium HUD but suited for Vulkan usage rather than OpenGL.

This functionality is implemented as a Vulkan overlay so we could end up seeing much of the same code re-used by the likes of the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver too albeit changes will need to be made to adapt to their different statistics/perf interfaces, etc.

This layer has been merged into Mesa 19.1 and currently displays frame timing and draw call / submission data. This layer's interface is rendered using the Imgui library.

Mesa 19.1 should be released around the end of May as the feature release succeeding the soon-to-be-out Mesa 19.0.