Recently, we merged the final changes needed to cross off Vulkan 1.4 support for PanVK on V10 and later GPUs. This is a huge milestone for PanVK, and it means that we're now up-to-date with the latest version of the specification. We're no longer playing catch-up!

The changes made it into the Mesa 25.2 release, which is currently in release-candidate state and expected to be released in around one week. Considering Mesa 25.1 released with Vulkan 1.2 support for PanVK on V10 and later GPUs, this means we managed to catch up two versions during one release! During development, we've also checked off support for all the features required for the Roadmap 2022 and Roadmap 2024 profiles as well.

It should be mentioned that the Vulkan 1.4 support is not yet formally conformant. Expect an update when that changes.

The pace from experimental

We're especially proud of the pace we've been keeping in hitting this target: From the merge-request that marked PanVK as non-experimental until the merge-request that enabled Vulkan 1.4, a little bit over 6 months passed! It might not be record pace, I believe that one belongs to Honeykrisp, which had truly mind-blowing pace. But in our case, the pace was set while developing everything upstream, which is something we value highly at Collabora.

The future

There are still a lot more things we can improve on, so don't expect things to slow down too much. The next big thing up is to try to match the performance of the DDK in most real-world use-cases, as well as generally improving compatibility with existing applications. We have a lot more extensions to enable!

In addition, we have older GPU generations that we'd like to bring up to speed, like Bifrost (V6 and V7), plus the first generation of Valhall (V9) which is currently completely lacking support.

And finally, Vulkan is constantly evolving, and we need to keep on top of those changes as well. This is going to include paying closer attention to what the Vulkan working group at Khronos is doing and taking more part in the development of Vulkan itself.

Acknowledgements

Of course, we didn't do all of this work alone. Huge thanks go out to both Arm and Google, who have been sending lots of features and improvements! We'd also like to thank the community who are actively testing PanVK!

And last but not least, I'd like to personally extend a huge thanks and applause to everyone working together with me on Panfrost at Collabora. You rule, and thanks a lot for the effort!

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