Cracking Windows Open: Porting RADV to Win32

19 hours ago

RADV is the open-source Mesa Vulkan driver for AMD GPUs, now the de facto Vulkan driver on Linux after AMD discontinued its proprietary alternative.
Porting RADV to Windows would enable a shared codebase across platforms, easier debugging, faster fixes, and community contributions benefiting all users.
Faith Ekstrand's initial work proved feasibility by reverse-engineering the WDDM2 interface, getting a 3D model to display, but with limitations.
This project improved flexibility, portability, and stability, achieving support for games like Counter-Strike 2, though not yet conformant.
Challenges included hardware generation differences, MSVC compiler incompatibilities, and opaque vendor-specific data in D3DKMT calls.
The biggest hurdle is the proprietary kernel driver interface, which relies on fragile reverse-engineered structures with no backward-compatibility guarantee.
Remaining work includes improving presentation via DXGI swapchains for better performance, potentially requiring AMD and Microsoft involvement.
The project is sponsored by Valve and aims to motivate collaboration toward a stable open-source Vulkan driver on Windows.

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