Learn about a Vulkan extension that helps developers debug unexpected behavior or compatibility issues by allowing an application to query info about Vulkan tools active on a system. This extension is VK_EXT_tooling_info and is available now in the SDKs for Vulkan header 1.2.135.
Applications can query Vulkan layers and tools. Some tools may reside in the driver or the loader. You can find the tooling extension on the LunarG/VulkanTools GitHub repo and it is now available for the LunarG Utility Layers in the Vulkan SDK.
Information available
During the query, the following information can be provided:
- the name of the tool
- the version of the tool
- flag bits describing the purposes of the tool (Validation, Profiling, Tracing, Adding Features, Modifying existing Features, etc.)
- a description of the tool
- and, if the tool is implemented by a layer, the name of said layer
Benefits of the tooling info extension
This extension will be useful for tools like RenderDoc and other Vulkan profilers/debuggers and will offer some uniformity and assistance to developers in debugging potential compatibility issues between Vulkan tools and other problems. In addition, a developer may want an application to check if it is using the correct version of a tool or a developer might want that information while debugging an issue. Purpose bits let the application and the developer know what effect the tool is having on the program.
For more information
Please read the Release Notes for Linux, Release Notes for Windows, or Release Notes for macOS for additional information or go to the Vulkan SDK download site to download the latest SDK.
LunarG’s software engineering experts create innovative products and services for open source and commercial customers using leading-edge 3D graphics and compute technologies, including Vulkan, SPIR-V, OpenXR, and OpenGL. We have strengths in performance analysis and tuning, runtime and tools development, shader optimizations, driver development, and porting engines and applications to Vulkan.
For more information about LunarG, please check out our website.
