From 2daf4211c550f20041ec0532793b4d029f7f3a6e Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Lucas Fryzek Igalia has been heavily supporting the Open-Source Turnip Vulkan driver for Qualcomm Adreno GPUs, and in 2022 we helped it achieve Vulkan 1.3 conformance. Danylo Piliaiev on the graphics team here at Igalia, wrote a great blog post on this achievement! One of the biggest challenges for the Turnip driver is that it is a completely reverse-engineered driver that has been built without access to any hardware documentation or reference driver code. With Vulkan 1.3 conformance has also come the ability to run more commercial games on Adreno GPUs through the use of the DirectX translation layers. If you would like to see more of this check out this post from Danylo where he talks about getting “The Witcher 3”, “The Talos Principle”, and “OMD2” running on the A660 GPU. Outside of Vulkan 1.3 support he also talks about some of the extensions that were implemented to allow “Zink” (the OpenGL over Vulkan driver) to run Turnip, and bring OpenGL 4.6 support to Adreno GPUs.Vulkan 1.3 support on Turnip
Several developers on the Graphics Team made several key contributions to Vulkan Extensions and the Vulkan conformance test suite (CTS). My colleague Ricardo Garcia made an excellent blog post about those contributions. Below I’ve listed what Igalia did for each of the extensions:
X.Org Developers Conference is one of the big conferences for us here at the Graphics Team. Last year at XDC 2022 our Team presented 5 talks in Minneapolis, Minnesota. XDC 2022 took place towards the end of the year in October, so it provides some good context on how the team closed out the year. If you didn’t attend or missed their presentation, here’s a breakdown:
Ricardo presents what exactly mesh shaders are in Vulkan. He made many contributions to this extension including writing 1000s of CTS tests for this extension with a blog post on his presentation that should check out!
- +Iago goes into detail about the current status of the Raspberry Pi Vulkan driver. He talks about achieving Vulkan 1.2 conformance, as well as some of the challenges the team had to solve due to hardware limitations of the Broadcom GPU.
- +Chema and Christopher talk about the challenges they had to solve to enable hardware acceleration on the Raspberry Pi without Glamor.
- +In this non-technical presentation, Melissa talks about techniques developers can use to understand and debug drivers without access to hardware documentation.
- +André talks about the work that has been done to enable asynchronous page flipping in DRM’s atomic API with an introduction to the topic by explaining about what exactly is asynchronous page flip, and why you would want it.
- +Another important conference for us is FOSDEM, and last year we presented 3 of the 5 talks in the graphics dev room. FOSDEM took place in early February 2022, these talks provide some good context of where the team started in 2022.