[OpenGL and Vulkan Interoperability on Linux] Part 6: About overwriting buffers [UPDATED]

This blog post (originally published on: Oct 18, 2020) has been updated in 2022 because some information was inaccurate.

I had misinterpreted a part of the spec about memory mapping and thought that we can’t really overwrite Vulkan allocated buffers. That had to do with the Intel cards memory organization where the GPU memory is RAM and we usually map it the same way we map user allocated memory. I am pretty sure that buffers should be overwritten now, and so I am planning to extend these series with buffer overwriting examples in the future.

Afaik, Tapani Pälli is working on supporting this feature on Intel and AMD might have some support already (I plan to check) so I believe that it will be soon available in most mesa drivers that support the interoperability extensions.

More blog posts about it coming (hopefully) soon!

• [1] EXT_external_objects specification
• [2] EXT_external_objects_fd specification
• [3] Previous posts on interoperability:
  • [OpenGL and Vulkan Interoperability on Linux] Part 1: Introduction
  • [OpenGL and Vulkan Interoperability on Linux] Part 2: Using OpenGL to draw on Vulkan textures.
  • [OpenGL and Vulkan Interoperability on Linux] Part 3: Using OpenGL to display Vulkan allocated textures.
  • [OpenGL and Vulkan Interoperability on Linux] Part 4: Using OpenGL to overwrite Vulkan allocated textures.
  • [OpenGL and Vulkan Interoperability on Linux] Part 5: A Vulkan pixel buffer is reused by OpenGL

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