gemini://gemini.tuxmachines.org/n/2022/12/13/Vulkan_extensions_Igalia_helped_ship_in

The end of 2022 is very close so I’m just in time for some self-promotion. As you may know, the ongoing collaboration between Valve and Igalia lets me and some of my colleagues work on improving the open-source Vulkan and OpenGL Conformance Test Suite. This work is essential to ship quality Vulkan drivers and, from the Khronos side, to improve the Vulkan standard further by, among other things, adding new functionality through API extensions. When creating a new extension, apart from reaching consensus among vendors about the scope and shape of the new APIs, CTS tests are developed in order to check the specification text is clear and vendors provide a uniform implementation of the basic functionality, corner cases and, sometimes, interactions with other extensions.

In addition to our CTS work, many times we review the Vulkan specification text from those extensions we develop tests for. We also do the same for other extensions and changes, and we also submit fixes and improvements of our own.

In 2022, our work was important to be able to ship a bunch of extensions you can probably see implemented in Mesa and used by VKD3D-Proton when playing your favorite games on Linux, be it on your PC or perhaps on the fantastic Steam Deck. Or maybe used by Zink when implementing OpenGL on top of your favorite Vulkan driver. Anyway, without further ado, let’s take a look.

Vulkan extensions Igalia helped ship in 2022