This is my attempt to get Vulkan going on NetBSD

Join the discussion

• Hacker News
• This is 100% AI slop.
  by rvz
• Lavapipe? So it's just Mesa software rendering stuff
  by spiral09
• That's the start. The idea is to get Vulkan running first. More to follow.
  by segaboy81
• I have never had a need for NetBSD, but in case I ever do, I’m glad it’s there. Especially with Linux deprecating old platforms.

  This looks like an unofficial effort but hopefully it gets refined and integrated.

  by iamnothere
• NetBSD already has relevant packages officially.
  by Tiberium
• The vulkan stack is rather lean (there are still c++ though, valve removed a lot of c++ for less c++, it would have been correct with plain and simple C).

  The big chunk is DRM kernel code.

  AMD seems to be working on _userland_ hardware command ring buffers, which should makes userland vulkan even simpler. Dunno how they will work around the VMID stuff though.

  by sylware
• There are already Vulkan components in pkgsrc and wip.
  by rjsw
• Which ones? I'm asking, because I wouldn't have done anything at all if this was pre-existing.
  by segaboy81
• Didn't modular-xorg, MESA and DRM drivers handle this?
  by anthk
• I expected this to be official from the title but it doesn’t seem to be.
  by MBCook
• This is a nice project but looks like is either AI written or AI assisted and I haven’t seen mention of that in any of the docs.
  by wbolt
• Installation instructions:

      ftp https://raw.githubusercontent.com/segaboy/vulkan-netbsd/main/scripts/setup-env.sh
         !^^^^^!
  

  That's... a bit unorthodox. FreeBSD has a `fetch`[1] utility for this, I wasn't aware NetBSD puts that in `ftp`[2].

  Interesting choice. I wonder what led to it.

  [1] https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?fetch

  [2] https://man.netbsd.org/ftp.1

  by klibertp
• Oldest supported machine for NetBSD is VAX 780 from 1978(!!!). One of the first system supporting mmu, 32 bit cpu, virtual memory etc etc

  This machine is so slow that it takes a lot of time to generate ssh keys etc. We talking here hours hehe

  NetBSD is known to support like 60 architectures - many of them low end embedded systems: so ftp AS A CHOICE (you have other options!) is very smart and easy

  by iberator
• I dunno, that feels very BSD to me. Presumably, they had a ftp utility first, and then when somebody wanted to download files over http they looked around and decided that the obvious thing to do was to add it to the existing file transfer/download program. Same as continuing to add functions to ifconfig rather than inventing a new ip tool.
  by yjftsjthsd-h
• Actually, it's orthodox; and it's fetch that isn't. FreeBSD is actually the odd one out, for having an extra tool for doing the same thing. The ftp tool in all of the BSDs, including FreeBSD, speaks HTTP, and has done since Luke Mewburn did lukemftp (later to be named tnftp) and Theo de Raadt did likewise, both based on the original 4.2BSD ftp, back in the middle 1990s.

  * https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/tree/contrib/tnftp/ChangeLog#n1...

  * https://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/usr.bin/ftp/main.c?...

  * https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/log/src/usr.bin/ftp/main.c,v?sort...

  by JdeBP
• > Vulkan is now available

  looks inside:

  > What this is NOT (yet): Running Vulkan programs

  by qiu3344
• Technically, it isn't wrong, if you consider Vulkan the technology rather than the service
  by LoganDark
• Lavapipe is CPU rendering, it doesn't really prove much. But also, Vulkan on BSDs is totally possible and isn't something esoteric, FreeBSD has it.

  > Build goal only: This targets compilation and linkage of the Vulkan stack. Runtime GPU acceleration is not available under VirtualBox; the software driver (Lavapipe) is the target.

  I don't understand why this would ever be a problem, even without LLM assistance it's something that sounds like a weekend project?

  by Tiberium
• this is what i would recommend. hoist it over from freebsd. it works well vulkan is fully usable, mesa works nicely. Even seen people playing with CUDA tho i didnt get that workin myself yey.
  by saidnooneever