Generic Vulkan Development Environment Setup and Troubleshooting

Vulkan is a new generation graphics and compute API that provides high-efficiency, cross-platform access to modern GPUs used in a wide variety of devices from PCs and consoles to mobile phones and embedded platforms.

This page lists steps and tips for setting up and trouble shooting a Vulkan development envirnoment. The information here is meant to be generic.

Vulkan architecture

Vulkan adopts a layered architecture, which aims to better support extensiblity. There are four components involved in this architecture:

The Vulkan loader sits between the Vulkan application, which calls Vulkan APIs, and the ICDs, which implements these Vulkan APIs. Vulkan layers agument the Vulkan system to provide optional features like validation and debugging. The Vulkan loader composes a chain of requested layers, which processes the Vulkan application's API calls one by one, and finally redirects the API calls made by the Vulkan application to one or more ICDs.

It's highly recommned to read the Architecture of the Vulkan Loader Interfaces Overview to get a general understanding of what these components are and how they interact with one another.

Vulkan development environment setup

Windows

You need to install the Vulkan SDK from LunarG to get the Vulkan loader.

Typically the Vulkan SDK will be installed at C:\VulkanSDK\<version>\ and there will be an environment variable VULKAN_SDK pointing to it. You can run the vulkancube executable under the Bin\ subdirectory of the Vulkan SDK to make sure everything works properly. If not, you probably need to check whether the graphics card is Vulkan capable or update the driver.

Debian/Ubuntu

The following packages should be installed for a proper Vulkan runtime to test the runtime functions properly:

libvulkan1 for the Vulkan loader libvulkan.so.
[AMD] mesa-vulkan-drivers for Mesa AMD Vulkan ICD.
[NVIDIA] nvidia-vulkan-icd for NVIDIA Vulkan ICD.

The above packages provide the Vulkan loader and ICDs. With them an Vulkan application should be able to run. You may additionally want to install

vulkan-tools for command-line tools like vulkaninfo (dumping available ICDs and their capabilities) and GUI application like vulkancube (rendering a rotating cube).

In order to develop Vulkan applications, you additionally need the following packages:

libvulkan-dev for various Vulkan header files.
vulkan-validationlayers for Vulkan validation layers like VkLayer_standard_validation.

Linux

For other Linux distros, please consult the corresponding package managment tools for the packages needed. (And please feel free to update this doc regarding them.)

You can also download and install the Vulkan SDK from LunarG. It packages the loader with many useful layers and other shader tools. The source code of the SDK component projects are included, allowing you to recompile the artifacts if needed.

You can also build the Vulkan SDK component projects like Vulkan-Loader and Vulkan-ValidationLayers from source. But note that building these components separately you need to make sure they are consistent with one another (e.g., using the same version of Vulkan headers) to function together.

If you have multiple versions of Vulkan loaders exist, you may also need to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH and LD_PRELOAD to load the desired version of the loader. For example:

$ LD_LIBRARY_PATH={PATH_TO_VULKAN_SDK}/x86_64/lib/
$ LD_PRELOAD=libvulkan.so.1

This can also be done by sourcing the proper setup-env.sh from one of the downloaded Vulkan SDKs.

Vulkan debugging and profiling

RenderDoc

RenderDoc is an awesome tool that one can use to capture and introspect Vulkan applications. It can be downloaded from RenderDoc's website or compiled from source.

Vulkan development environment troubleshooting

Useful environment variables

There are a few environment variables that can alter the default Vulkan loader behavior and print verbose information, notably:

VK_LOADER_DEBUG: enable loader debug messages. Setting it to all will enable the most verbose logging from the loader. This is especially useful when trying to see what layers/ICDs are searched and used.
VK_ICD_FILENAMES: force the loader to use a specific ICD. This is especially useful when you have multiple Vulkan capable devices and want to select which one to use manually.
VK_INSTANCE_LAYERS: force the loader to enable the given layers. For example, You can force enable VK_LAYER_LUNARG_api_dump to have a detailed dump of all Vulkan API calls made by the application. You can force enable VK_LAYER_LUNARG_core_validation to validate the API calls made by the application.
VK_LAYER_PATH: override the loader's standard layer libary search folders.

Please see the Vulkan loader's documentation for detailed explanation for these variables.

Setting environment variables for Bazel test

Bazel runs tests in a sandbox and environment variables must be passed through to the test runner. Consider putting environment setup in a user.bazelrc to save typing. For example:

test --test_env="LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/absolute/path/to/vulkan/sdk/x86_64/lib/"
test --test_env="LD_PRELOAD=libvulkan.so.1"
test --test_env="VK_LAYER_PATH=/absolute/path/to/additional/layers/:$VK_LAYER_PATH"

SSH on Linux and X forwarding

Physical devices enumerated on NVIDIA drivers can be affected by the DISPLAY environment variable. If you are running under an SSH session to Linux or using chrome remote desktop and have problems with physical device enumeration, you probably want to check the DISPLAY environment and set it to point to a display at the server side, for example:

export DISPLAY=:0