Question, from an application developer's perspective: What is the implication in regards to cross-platform Vulkan applications? I.e., my 3D applications all use Vulkan, and they compile and just work on both Windows, and Ubuntu. Does this mean that on other or older distros, they might not work?
I don’t think the support depends on distros much, I think the main variable is hardware. If you have a desktop PC bought in the last ~5 years the support should be OK, for the hardware older than that the support is not guaranteed. GeForce GT 730 (launched in 2014) doesn’t support Vulkan, Intel only supports Vulkan on Windows starting from Skylake launched in 2015.
Then there’re quality issues. If you search internets for “Windows Vulkan issue” you’ll find many end users with crashing games, game developers with crashing game engines https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/100807 recommendations to update drivers or disable some Vulkan layers in registry, etc.
On Windows, Vulkan is simply not as reliable as D3D. The reasons include market share, D3D being a requirement to render the desktop, D3D runtime being a part of the OS supported by Microsoft (Vulkan relies solely on GPU vendors), and D3D being older (first version of VK spec released in 2016, D3D11 is from 2009).
Another thing, on Linux, the situation with Vulkan support is less than ideal for mobile and embedded systems. Some embedded ARM SoCs only support GLES 3.1 (which BTW is not too far from D3D 11.0 feature-wise) but not Vulkan.
Agree overall. Just want to point out that Vulkan works on Intel Haswell. I have a 2013 MacBook Air and a 2013 Mac Pro that both have Haswell. Linux kernel 6.14 actually includes an Haswell Vulkan update from Intel themselves.
> Does this mean that on other or older distros, they might not work
Yep exactly. While Vulkan API is well defined and mostly stable, there is no guarantee in Linux implementation will also be stable. Moreover Khronos graphics APIs only deal with the stuff after you allocated a buffer and did all the handshakes with the OS and GPU drivers. On Linux none of those have API / ABI / runtime configuration stability guarantees. Basically it works until only one of the libraries in the chain breaks the compatibility.
This is BS. Vulkan buffers are allocated with Vulkan functions. Window system integration is also provided by window-system specific Vulkan extensions just like it was with WGL/GLX/EGL etc. These are all well defined and stable.
That depends how you build you program and what other dependencies you pull in. But as far as Vulkan is concerned your program should run on any distro that is as least as new as the one you build on (talking about ABI, runtime requirements depend on hardware but don't depend on the system you build on).
