Available for testing on Ubuntu, Red Hat, and Fedora Linux

Feb 17, 2016 03:00 GMT  ·  By

Immediately after the release of the mature Vulkan 1.0 API, Intel's Jason Ekstrand was proud to announce the initial availability of an open-source Vulkan driver for Intel hardware.

The Vulkan-based open-source driver for Intel GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) is developed by the Intel Mesa team and promises to support Intel processors from the fifth and sixth Core generation (Broadwell and Skylake), on which it passes the Vulkan 1.0 conformance test suite. Experimental support for older Intel CPUs is provided as well.

"We will work on up-streaming the driver in the next few weeks and hope to have it all in place in time for mesa 11.3 (mesa 12?). In the mean time, the driver can be found in the 'vulkan' branch of the mesa git repo on freedesktop.org," said Jason Ekstrand on behalf of the Intel Open Source Technology 3D Graphics Team.

The driver has been in development for the past year or so, and the Intel Mesa team promises to track the upstream development very closely and push a final release as part of the upcoming Mesa 3D Graphics Library 11.3 or 12, whichever milestone the Mesa devs are planning after the release of Mesa 11.2.

In the meanwhile, early adopters can grab the latest source code of the forthcoming Vulkan driver for Intel hardware from the "vulkan" branch of the main Mesa Git repository. Red Hat, Fedora, and Ubuntu users can also install it using the instructions provided by Intel in the official announcement.