The Khronos consortium, responsible for developing graphic standards, has recognized the full compatibility of the open NVK driver for NVIDIA graphics cards with the Vulkan 1.0 specification. The driver successfully passed all tests from the CTS (Kronos Conformance Test Suite) and is included in the list of certified drivers. The certification has been completed for NVIDIA GPUs based on the Turing microarchitecture (TITAN RTX, GeForce RTX 2060/2070/2080, GeForce GTX 1660, Quadro RTX 3000-8000, Quadro T1000/T2000). The verification was carried out in an environment with Linux kernel 6.5, X.Org X Server 1.20.14, XWayland 22.1.9, and GNOME Shell 44.4. Obtaining the certification allows for official claims of compatibility with graphic standards and the use of related Khronos trademarks.
The NVK driver was created from scratch by a team that includes Karol Herbst (Nouveau developer from Red Hat), David Airlie (DRM subsystem maintainer from Red Hat), and Jason Ekstrand (active Mesa developer from Collabora). In developing the driver, the developers used official header files and open kernel modules published by NVIDIA. The NVK code occasionally utilized basic components of the OpenGL Nouveau driver, but due to differences in naming conventions in the NVIDIA header files and those in Nouveau, obtained through reverse engineering, direct code borrowing has been challenging, necessitating rethinking many aspects and implementing them from the ground up.
The development was conducted with the goal of creating a new reference Vulkan driver for Mesa, the code of which can be borrowed for the creation of other drivers. To achieve this, the NVK driver development considered all existing experience in Vulkan driver development, aimed to keep the codebase in optimal shape, and minimized code transfer from other Vulkan drivers, focusing on proper implementation for optimal and high-quality performance rather than blindly copying how others have done it. The driver is already part of Mesa, and the necessary changes to the Nouveau DRM driver's API are included in the Linux kernel 6.6.
The announcement notes the adoption of a new backend compiler for NVK, written in Rust, which addresses issues from the old compiler that hindered the processing of Kronos texts. It also eliminates some fundamental architectural limitations that could not be fixed without a complete redesign of the old compiler. Future plans include adding support for GPUs based on the Maxwell microarchitecture and implementing full support for the Vulkan 1.3 API.
Source: opennet.ru
