Yesterday AMD developers did their first AMDVLK open-source push of 2019. That first update in nearly a month updated against the Vulkan 1.1.96 headers, added GPU memory references to software compositing images, clean-ups for the barrier handling, various PAL and LLPC fixes, and other changes. Based upon that source code state from yesterday, an Ubuntu Debian package is now available of just the Vulkan driver and validated for at least 16.04/18.04 installations but should end up working too for e.g. 18.10. Read the entire story on Phoronix.

Update: Due to a bug in 1.1.92.0, 1.1.92.1 has been released. Fixed: a loader bug when initializing the VK_EXT_debug_utils extension where the loader would pass in invalid instance handle to layers. This would cause a crash in layers that attempted to use the extension.

This latest release of the LunarG SDK supports Vulkan API revision 1.1.92. Introducing vkconfig, the new Vulkan Configurator tool. This is a graphical application that allows a user to specify which layers will be loaded by Vulkan applications at runtime. VulkanSDK Ubuntu packages are no longer in beta. As well, seven new extensions have been added: VK_EXT_calibrated_timestamps, VK_EXT_image_drm_format_modifier, VK_EXT_pci_bus_info, VK_EXT_transform_feedback, VK_GOOGLE_decorate_string, VK_AMD_memory_overallocation_behavior, VK_NV_ray_tracing.

LunarG now delivers native Ubuntu Linux packages for all the elements in the Vulkan SDK in addition to the Linux SDK tarball. Follow the Ubuntu Packages link on the LunarXchange SDK web page to gain access to the native Ubuntu Linux packages. These packages will install pre-built SDK binaries on a system running Ubuntu Linux and contain all the LunarG Vulkan SDK components at the latest available version. For Ubuntu Linux users, this is the most convenient way to get the Linux SDK content since you will not need to build any binaries yourself. Headers, libraries, and tools are included and prebuilt. Read the LunarG blog for more details.