Cracking Windows Open: Porting RADV to Win32
We are porting RADV, the open-source Mesa Vulkan driver for AMD GPUs, from Linux to Windows. Building on Faith Ekstrand's reverse-engineering work, we achieved native support and successfully ran Counter-Strike 2. While challenges like compiler differences and undocumented interfaces remain, this effort aims to create a shared codebase for faster debugging and community contributions across operating systems.
It's such an improbable proposition that we might actually get there faster than light (spoiler alert: that's going to be a little slower).
- leonmeng
Impressive progress—getting CS2 running is a huge milestone. Hopefully AMD provides a stable KMD interface so this can become more than an exciting experiment.
- userbinator
Developing our own KMD is not really an option
Why not? Fully open-source Windows GPU drivers would be great. Incidentally, this sort of "glue code" is probably something LLM assistance could help greatly with much of the grunt work.
(E.g. there is already a generic framebuffer driver for Win3x/9x: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47646363 but one of the ideas I have --- which anyone else with the time is more than welcome to attempt --- is to port the existing open-source Linux drivers for AMD/NVIDIA/Intel to early Windows versions that never even had closed-source drivers available, giving them full 2D/3D acceleration. Theoretically, something as crazy as CUDA on Windows 95 is possible, and perhaps some vibecoding can turn that into reality. After all, as I write this comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49089814 is on the main page.)
- madhu_ghalame
A compatibility matrix showing supported GPUs, Vulkan features, and current limitations would help developers evaluate the project.