Vulkan® API Documentation Project
This repository contains sources for the formal documentation of the Vulkan API. This includes:
-
The Vulkan API Specification
-
Specification of Vulkan extensions
-
API reference (“man”) pages
-
The XML API Registry (also mirrored at Vulkan-Headers)
-
Vulkan header files (also mirrored at Vulkan-Headers)
-
Related tools and scripts.
The authoritative public repository is located at Vulkan-Docs. It hosts a public Issue tracker, and outside developers can file proposed changes (Pull Requests) against the Specification, subject to approval by Khronos.
If in doubt where to submit your Issue, consult the Vulkan-Ecosystem repository.
External Contributions
Khronos welcomes feedback in Github Issues, and proposed changes in Github Pull Requests (PRs), but will not necessarily accept all such changes.
Please keep your issues and pull requests focused on solving a single problem. Broader feedback that tries to solve multiple problems, or touches many parts of the Specification at once, is difficult for the Vulkan Working Group to review in a timely fashion.
Branch Structure
The current Specification is maintained in the default branch (currently
main
) of the repository.
From this branch it is possible to generate Specifications for any published
version of Vulkan (1.2, 1.1, and 1.0), and incorporating any desired set of
extensions.
Each published update is tagged in the form 1.2.release
where release
is a constantly incrementing release number and 1.2
is the latest
published version of the API.
The last public spec update prior to Vulkan 1.2 is tagged v1.1.130
.
The last state of the default branch in Khronos' internal gitlab server,
before 1.2 content was merged into it, is tagged 1.1-archive
(this tag is
not in github).
Directory Structure
The directory structure is as follows:
README.adoc This file
BUILD.adoc Documents how to build the specifications and reference pages
CONTRIBUTING.adoc Requirements for external contributions to the repository
COPYING.adoc Copyright and licensing information
CODE_OF_CONDUCT.adoc Code of Conduct
LICENSE.adoc Summary of licenses used by files in the repository
ChangeLog.txt Change log summary for each public spec update
Makefile, make* Makefile and helper build scripts (see BUILD.adoc)
appendices/ Specification appendices
chapters/ Specification chapters
proposals/ Design documents for extensions
config/ Asciidoctor configuration, CSS, and index generator
images/ Images (figures, diagrams, icons)
gen/out/ Default directory for the generated documents
scripts/ Helper scripts used in specification, header, and reference page generation
style/ Sources for "styleguide" (Vulkan Documentation and Extensions: Procedures and Conventions)
xml/ XML API Registry (vk.xml)
registry.txt Sources for documentation of the vk.xml format
Building the Specification and Reference Pages
The document sources are marked up in Asciidoctor format, and we use
asciidoctor
and related toolchain components to generate output documents.
See BUILD.adoc for more information on installing the
toolchain and building the Specification.
Generating Headers and Related Files
See xml/README.adoc.
The header files (include/vulkan/vulkan*.h
) and many parts of the
specification and reference page documents are generated from descriptions
in the XML API Registry (xml/vk.xml
).
The generated files are not checked into the repository.
If you change vk.xml
, you can regenerate the headers by going into
xml/
and running:
$ make clean install
The other generated files are built as required via dependencies in
the top-level Makefile
.