# vulkan nVidia FreeBSD12



## danaeckel (Jan 3, 2019)

Greetings,
     I am new to running FreeBSD as a desktop and trying to stretch it's legs out. My system has FreeBSD12, nVidia 1080 card and driver from the ports which is 390.87_1. If it matters or not I have KDE Plasma. I installed the package for vkquake and looks to install properly, but when I run it I see a "Couldn't fund any Vulkan devices" error. I have seen reports that say Vulkan isn't support, and some say that it is. Could someone point me in the right direction?

Thanks!


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## olli@ (Jan 3, 2019)

I seems Vulkan is _not_ supported by Nvidia's driver for FreeBSD: https://developer.nvidia.com/vulkan-driver


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## shkhln (Jan 3, 2019)

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/unreal-engine-4-20.66785/#post-397179


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## olli@ (Jan 3, 2019)

shkhln said:


> https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/unreal-engine-4-20.66785/#post-397179


Very interesting – Thanks for that!
Do you plan to create an “official” port from that, so owners of an Nvidia card (like myself) can have Vulkan support on FreeBSD?


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## shkhln (Jan 3, 2019)

olli@ said:


> Do you plan to create an “official” port from that



I don't plan submitting a port. Honestly, it's shouldn't take Nvidia more than a couple of hours of developer time to enable Vulkan in FreeBSD driver (and include 32-bit libs in amd64 package, those are missing as well). If we complain loudly enough they might actually do it.


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## olli@ (Jan 3, 2019)

shkhln said:


> I don't plan submitting a port. Honestly, it's shouldn't take Nvidia more than a couple of hours of developer time to enable Vulkan in FreeBSD driver (and include 32-bit libs in amd64 package, those are missing as well). If we complain loudly enough they might actually do it.


I'm afraid they won't do it.


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## danaeckel (Jan 4, 2019)

I was afraid that was the answer. I downloaded Dolphin WII emulator, worked great with GL selected, no go with vulkan. I was tempted to download driver 415 from nVidia site, but I read those drivers should never be used.


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## shkhln (Jan 4, 2019)

danaeckel said:


> I was afraid that was the answer.



Please, try the workaround linked above and report whether that works for you.



danaeckel said:


> I was tempted to download driver 415 from nVidia site, but I read those drivers should never be used.



You should be tempted to edit the port's Makefile instead


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## kpedersen (Jan 5, 2019)

olli@ said:


> I'm afraid they won't do it.



I possibly agree but do you have any sources / reasons for thinking this? Is this how NVIDIA is going to finally weasel their way out of supporting FreeBSD?

My timeline had it being around 3 years from now that NVIDIA will pull the FreeBSD plug but I guess if the world does move to Vulkan then it will possibly coincide with around then and this is how they will do it (by simply never updating to support the current industry standard and hoping the driver in general fizzles out quietly).

I personally think it is good. Being able to rely on these binary drivers has been too easy. It might help focus the foundation on keeping with the open-source drivers (amdgpu, radeonkms, i915kms) and restarting up nouveau porting efforts.


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## shkhln (Jan 5, 2019)

kpedersen said:


> My timeline had it being around 3 years from now that NVIDIA will pull the FreeBSD plug but I guess if the world does move to Vulkan then it will possibly coincide with around then and this is how they will do it (by simply never updating to support the current industry standard and hoping the driver in general fizzles out quietly).



Joke's on them — it's perfectly possible to run Nvidia's Linux kernel driver on top of linuxkpi. Can't weasel out of this one.


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## olli@ (Jan 5, 2019)

kpedersen said:


> I possibly agree but do you have any sources / reasons for thinking this?


Well, I guess Nvidia is aware that the market share of people running FreeBSD on the desktop with Nvidia graphics who want to play a game natively that supports the Vulkan API only is very small. Do they even know that there are some people who want it? Has anybody involved in this thread complained to Nvidia support? I guess not …


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## shkhln (Jan 5, 2019)

olli@ said:


> Has anybody involved in this thread complained to Nvidia support?



No, I don't believe the regular customer support is an appropriate channel for questions concerning intentionally disabled features. I considered Unix Graphics forum, but then Vulkan is already mentioned there, there are pretty much always 0 replies from Nvidia employees and they have somewhat obnoxious registration form.


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## danaeckel (Jan 6, 2019)

Makes sense to use the Linux version with the Linux libraries loaded. I'll have to give that one a shot.


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## shkhln (Jan 6, 2019)

Actually, no. The workaround (glibc shim) helps loading a single Linux library (libGL.so) into otherwise fully native FreeBSD processes, as opposed to executing programs via Linuxulator subsystem. This is generally not safe, but it's possible to make it work for some specific cases.


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