Posted on 18/07/2017 by Alexandros Frantzis
Ever since Vulkan was announced a few years ago, the idea of creating a Vulkan benchmarking tool in the spirit of glmark2 had been floating in my mind. Recently, thanks to my employer, Collabora, this idea has materialized! The result is the vkmark Vulkan benchmark, hosted on github:
https://github.com/vkmark/vkmark
Like its glmark2 sibling project, vkmark’s goals are different from the goals of big, monolithic and usually proprietary benchmarks. Instead of providing a single, complex benchmark, vkmark aims to provide an extensible suite of targeted, configurable benchmarking scenes. Most scenes exercise specific Vulkan features or usage patterns (e.g., desktop 2.5D scenarios), although we are also happy to have more complex, visually intriguing scenes.
Benchmarking scenes can be configured with options that affect various aspects of their rendering. We hope that the ease with which developers can use different options will make it painless to perform targeted tests and eventually provide best practices advice.
A few years ago we were pleasantly surprised to learn that developers were using glmark2 as a testing tool for driver development, especially in free (as in freedom) software projects. This is a goal that we want to actively pursue for vkmark, too. The flexible benchmarking approach is a natural fit for this kind of development; the developer can start with getting the simple scenes working and then, as the driver matures, move to scenes that use more advanced features. vkmark has already proved useful in this regard, being an valuable testing aid for my own experiments in the Mesa Vulkan WSI implementation.
With vkmark we also want to be on the cutting edge of software development practices and tools. vkmark is a modern, C++14 codebase, using the vulkan-hpp bindings, the Meson build system and the Catch test framework. To ensure a high quality codebase, the core of vkmark is developed using test-driven development.
It is still early days, but vkmark already has support for X11, Wayland and DRM/KMS, and provides two simple scenes: a “clear” scene, and a “cube” scene that renders a simple colored cube based on the vkcube example (which is itself based on kmscube). The future looks bright!
We are looking forward to getting more feedback on vkmark and, of course, contributions are always welcome!
18/09/2018
When working on the Linux Kernel, testing via QEMU is pretty common. Here's a look at virtme, a QEMU wrapper that uses the host instead…
30/08/2018
Earlier this month, Collabora sponsored & hosted the XMMP Sprint, the first developer event in the XMPP community in a long time. Here's…
29/08/2018
In addition to Collabora's work to add support in mainline Linux kernel for several Chromebooks, these platforms are now being continuously…
27/08/2018
Working with a git based project that has a defacto upstream repository means that you perioducally want to fetch the canonical master branch.…
21/08/2018
A look at the work and motivation behind implementing the Khronos EGLDevice extensions in Mesa. These extensions allow users of open source…
03/08/2018
GNOME Builder is an Integrated Development Environment designed for the GNOME ecosystem. It most notably features a deep integration to…
Whether writing a line of code or shaping a longer-term strategic software development plan, we'll help you navigate the ever-evolving world of Open Source.
한국어 버전의 Collabora.com 보기
Acesse Collabora.com em Português
Comments (0)
Add a Comment