GLOVE (GL Over Vulkan) is a cross-platform software library that acts as an intermediate layer between an OpenGL ES 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 Linux, Android, MS Windows and MacOS platforms, 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.
The minimum Vulkan loader version must be 1.0.24.
Optionally, GLOVE supports the VK_KHR_maintenance1 extension, used for OpenGL to Vulkan Coordinates conversion (left handed to right handed coordinate system).
GLOVE has been successfully tested with GLOVE demos with the following configurations
| GL version | Graphics Card | Vulkan Driver | Vulkan API | OS | Windows Platform | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ES 2.0 | Intel Ivybridge Desktop | Mesa 17.3.3 | 1.0.54 | Ubuntu 16.04 | XCB | success |
| ES 2.0 | Intel HD Graphics 530 (Skylake GT2) | Mesa 18.0.5 | 1.0.57 | Ubuntu 16.04 | XCB | success |
| ES 2.0 | Intel HD Graphics 630 (Kabylake GT2) | Mesa 18.0.5 | 1.0.61 | Ubuntu 16.04 | XCB | success |
| ES 2.0 | Intel Ivybridge Desktop | Mesa 17.3.3 | 1.0.54 | Ubuntu 16.04 | WAYLAND | success |
| ES 2.0 | Intel HD Graphics 530 (Skylake GT2) | Mesa 18.0.5 | 1.0.57 | Ubuntu 16.04 | WAYLAND | success |
| ES 2.0 | Radeon RX 550 Series | Mesa 18.0.5 | 1.0.61 | Ubuntu 16.04 | XCB | success |
| ES 2.0 | Radeon RX 550 Series | AMDGPU-Pro v18.40 | 1.1.77 | Ubuntu 16.04 | XCB | success |
| ES 2.0 | GeForce 940M | NVIDIA 396.51 | 1.1.70 | Ubuntu 16.04 | XCB | success |
| ES 2.0 | GeForce GTX 670 | NVIDIA 396.54 | 1.1.70 | Ubuntu 18.04 | XCB | success |
| ES 2.0 | Mali-G71 | ARM 482.381.3347 | 1.0.26 | Android 7.0 | Android | success |
| ES 2.0 | Mali-G71 | ARM 485.111.1108 | 1.0.65 | Android 8.0 | Android | success |
| ES 2.0 | GeForce GTX 1050 | NVIDIA 416.83 | 1.1.84 | Windows 10 | Windows | success |
| ES 2.0 | Intel Iris Graphics 6100 | MoltenVK v1.0.38 | 1.1.126 | macOS Catalina | MacOS | success |
| ES 2.0 | Intel HD Graphics 530 (Skylake GT2) | Mesa v19.3.2 | 1.2.31 | OpenSUSE Tumbleweed | XCB | success |
| ES 2.0 | Intel HD Graphics 530 (Skylake GT2) | Mesa v19.3.2 | 1.2.31 | OpenSUSE Tumbleweed | WAYLAND | success |
You can find a short description on GLOVE's software design as well as "How To extend GLOVE" guidelines in the GLOVE Design Document.
GLOVE project is considered as work in progress, therefore contributions are more than welcome! Guidelines of how to contribute to GLOVE can be found here.
To create your local git repository:
git clone https://github.com/Think-Silicon/GLOVE.git
To install all required packages:
For Ubuntu
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.
For OpenSUSE
sudo zypper install -t pattern devel_C_C++
sudo zypper install cmake extra-cmake-modules libX11-devel
To install packages libvulkan1 vulkan-headers vulkan-loader vulkan tools follow the directions in the links below
https://software.opensuse.org/package/libvulkan1 https://software.opensuse.org/package/vulkan-loader https://software.opensuse.org/package/vulkan-headers https://software.opensuse.org/package/vulkan-tools
To compile GLOVE on Windows, you need
To facilitate running and debugging GLOVE on MS Windows, it is recommended to download Vulkan SDK .
Python3 and cmake are required for MacOS. You can install them via homebrew with the following commands
brew install cmake
brew install python3
GLOVE has been tested in macOS, using MoltenVK (Vulkan to Metal middleware), which creates the necessary Vulkan headers and Vulkan loader (libMoltenVK.dylib). Instructions on how to build MoltenVk can be found here.
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:
python3.x update_external_sources.py
ATTENTION: Python 3 is supported only, so you need to install python 3.x version
Linux Users can also use the equivalent bash shell script, as follows
./update_external_sources.sh
View the Building Instructions for detailed instructions on how to configure and build GLOVE on the supported platforms.
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 the Known Issues List.
A demo SDK that contains fully commented, highly optimized C applications (accompanied by the ESSL shader source code) is available with GLOVE. 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.
GLOVE is aiming to take advantage of Vulkan in terms of performance. Our preliminary results are very promising and further major performance upgrades are also in progress. Instructions to use some available benchmarks for testing can be found in the Benchmarking README.
Full Credit list at Credits page.