Gateware : The End of the Second Month

Another two weeks have passed since my last post, so it has now been two months since I started working. In the past two weeks, I have fully implemented a raytracing flag to the graphics options. Also in this blog, I will be reflecting on my overall time working on Gateware.

The main focus, as I previously mentioned, was implementing the raytracing flag as an option to make it easier for users to use raytracing, as it will set up all the extensions for them. This meant that the first thing I did was simply add the raytracing option to the graphics options enum in graphics define.

After that, I went into the GVulkanSurface_core.hpp and started by adding the if check for the flag and added the extensions if the if check was successful.

The next part I implemented was in the device creation. Again, we checked for the flag, and if it was true, then the needed extensions were implemented. These included:  

• VkPhysicalDeviceRayTracingPipelineFeaturesKHR
• VkPhysicalDeviceAccelerationStructureFeaturesKHR
• VkPhysicalDeviceVulkan12Features
• VkPhysicalDeviceFeatures2

After they were implemented, I also modified the get best gpu function to make it so that a gpu with raytracing support would be higher scored.

The last part was adding the unit test, which was a bit tricky as I thought it would be pretty much the same as the bindless one, but it actually required an extra check for extensions, otherwise it would fail on the CI/CD pipeline on all the runners except for one.

That leads us to the code review, which left me with a bit more to do before the feature was implemented. The problem now was that the additional extensions added to the device extension count were hardcoded, so I changed it to be based on the flags instead of hardcoding it to the max amount of possible extensions.

That finished off the raytracing flag addition, and it was finally ready to be implemented!

That now brings me to the end of my open portfolio classes and the end of my time here, so reflecting on the time I worked on Gateware, I can say that I learned a lot. It was my first time really working on such a large codebase. So, there were lots of things that I encountered for the first time and that were challenging to me, so it was a great learning experience, and it feels like I learned a lot that will be helpful moving forward, and when working in the industry. Overall, I am really grateful for this opportunity and am excited to see where these skills will take me next.

Gateware : The Start of the Second Month

Another two weeks have passed since my last post, so it has now been a month and a half since I started working. In the past two weeks, I have completed adding compute queue support to GVulkanSurface so you can now use compute shaders and also started to work on adding a raytracing flag to the graphics options.

The main focus of the last two weeks has been on fully implementing the compute queue support and the matching unit test, so let's start by going over that. The first thing I did was create a new function for getting the compute queue. This was quite simple as it followed the same pattern as getting the graphics or present queue. 

Then I also updated the function that got all of the queue family indexes (more on that later). The last thing to update before working on the unit testing side was to update the get gpu function to add more weight to a gpu that had compute queue support.

To test the compute queue support I had to write a glsl shader, for the compute queue test I was told to test it away from graphics, so I focused on testing with actual computing/math by writing my shader to take an input buffer square the values and return them in an output buffer. I chose to use two seperate buffers instead of just one for better readability.

The test was a success! Which meant I had successfully written compute queue support for Vulkan, and a successful unit test as well. After a code review, I just needed to add back a deprecated version of a function using Doxygen's deprecated feature to prevent any problems on the back end. And then the merge was successful! Meaning that Gateware now supports compute queues and shaders in Vulkan.

Now That leaves us with what I am currently working on which is adding a raytracing flag to the graphics options so that it will be easier to work with raytracing using Gateware. I just started this so I haven't got much to say yet, but will be posting about that in the next post!

Gateware: the first month

Two weeks have passed since my last post, making the total time working in Gateware one month!! In the past two weeks I have worked on various things, including finishing up the derive a plane from a given point + normal, and also fixed an issue where the GVulkanSurface test for checking for compute queue support was failing.

Starting with the math function implementation, I was able to finish of the function and unit testing in the first few days following my last post. The main thing I had left to write and clean up was the unit testing itself. Following that the merge request went into code review and after getting some feedback I cleaned up the function itself by removing a redundant magnitude check and changing the formatting a bit for clarity. I also added more fail tests to cover more cases to ensure a full test suite for the function.

After that, another code review left me with some changes I forgot to make to the Doxygen documentation, which was luckily really quick, and then the merge request was approved!

After that was successfully merged, I started work on a new issue, which was GVulkanSurface not allowing compute queue support. The test was already written to check, but it was crashing. There were two main problems in the code, firstly there was a cleanup call at the end of the create function that was deallocating everything, which was causing GetDevice to fail. After commenting that out, the GetDevice succeeded, I was able to identify the next problem. The queueFamilyIndex was being used without being initialized. This was causing problems because it was being used to get the index of an array. Luckily, the fix for this was simple! I just needed to add a for loop to loop through the queueFamilyCount and then set the queueFamilyIndex equal to the current iteration and then it was able to be successfully used. The test was now running with no crashes and succeeding.

And that has been the past two weeks! I am now going to be working on actually adding the compute queues and so look out for that in another two weeks!