GLOVE - GL Over Vulkan

GLOVE (GL Over Vulkan) is a software library that acts as an intermediate layer between an OpenGL application and Vulkan.

GLOVE is focused towards embedded systems and is comprised of OpenGL ES and EGL implementations, which translate at runtime all OpenGL ES / EGL calls & ESSL shaders to Vulkan commands & SPIR-V shader respectively and finally relays them to the underlying Vulkan driver.

GLOVE has been designed towards facilitating developers to easily build and integrate new features, allowing at the same time its further extension, portability and interoperability. Currently, GLOVE supports OpenGL ES 2.0 and EGL 1.4 on a Linux platform, but the modular design can be easily extended to encompass implementations of other client APIs as well.

GLOVE is considered as a work-in-progress and is open-sourced under the LGPL v3 license through which it is provided as free software with unlimited use for educational and research purposes.

Future planned extensions of GLOVE include the support for OpenGL ES 3.x and OpenGL applications.

Prerequisites

As a prerequisite for correct functioning, GLOVE must be linked to a Vulkan driver implementation which supports VK_KHR_maintenance1 extension, mandatory for OpenGL to Vulkan Coordinates conversion (left handed to right handed coordinate system). Also, the minimum Vulkan loader version must be 1.0.24.

Tested with the following configurations

GLOVE has been tested with GLOVE demos with the following configurations

SW Design

You can find a short description on GLOVE SW design as well as "How To extend GLOVE" guidelines in GLOVE Design Document

Installation Instructions

Download the Repository

To create your local git repository:

git clone https://github.com/Think-Silicon/GLOVE.git

Required Packages

To install all required packages:

sudo apt-get install git cmake extra-cmake-modules libvulkan-dev vulkan-utils build-essential libx11-xcb-dev

Optionally "mesa-vulkan-drivers" package is needed if no other Vulkan driver is available. The compiler minimum version that this project is built with, is GCC 4.9.3, although earlier versions may work.

External Repositories Dependencies

Khronos glslang repository is mandatory for compiling, validating and generating SPIR-V from ESSL shaders.

Google googletest repository is used for unit testing.

To get and build the above projects:

./update_external_sources.sh

Configure Building

GLOVE building can be configured according to the options listed in the following table:

./configure.sh [-options]

Build Project

To build the Project:

make

Install Project

To install all necessary files to system directories (superuser privilege might be required):

make install

Uninstall

To uninstall the libraries from the system directories (superuser privilege might be required):

make uninstall

Known Issues

GLOVE is considered as work-in-progress, therefore there are known issues that have to be resolved or improved.

You can see a detailed list of issues in Known Issues List

Demos

GLOVE is accompanied by a demo SDK that contains fully commented, highly optimized C applications (accompanied by the ESSL shader source code). These demos demonstrate some simple rendering techniques with different geometry complexities, as they were designed with the restrictions of low-power embedded platforms in mind.

See details in Demos README

Benchmarking

GLOVE is aiming to take advantage of Vulkan in terms of performance. First results are very promising and major performance upgrades are in progress too. Instructions to use some available benchmarks for testing can be found in Benchmarking README