This project provides Khronos official ICD loader and validation layers for Vulkan developers on Windows and Linux.
Vulkan is an Explicit API, enabling direct control over how GPUs actually work. No (or very little) validation or error checking is done inside a Vulkan driver. Applications have full control and responsibility. Any errors in how Vulkan is used often result in a crash. This project provides standard validation layers that can be enabled to ease development by helping developers verify their applications correctly use the Vulkan API.
Vulkan supports multiple GPUs and multiple global contexts (VkInstance). The ICD loader is necessary to support multiple GPUs and the VkInstance level Vulkan commands. Additionally, the loader manages inserting Vulkan layer libraries, including validation layers between the application and the ICD.
The following components are available in this repository:
If you intend to contribute, the preferred work flow is for you to develop your contribution in a fork of this repo in your GitHub account and then submit a pull request. Please see the CONTRIBUTING file in this respository for more details
BUILD.md includes directions for building all the components, running the validation tests and running the demo applications.
Information on how to enable the various Validation layers is in layers/README.md.
Architecture and interface information for the loader is in loader/LoaderAndLayerInterface.md.
This work is released as open source under a Apache-style license from Khronos including a Khronos copyright.
See COPYRIGHT.txt for a full list of licenses used in this repository.
While this project has been developed primarily by LunarG, Inc; there are many other companies and individuals making this possible: Valve Corporation, funding project development; Google providing significant contributions to the validation layers; Khronos providing oversight and hosting of the project.