Vulkan Cereal

Vulkan Cereal is a code generator that makes it easier to serialize and forward Vulkan API calls from one place to another, such as:

• From a virtual machine guest to host for virtualized graphics
• From one process to another for IPC graphics
• From one computer to another via network sockets

Installation, build, and Hello World use case

Currently, Vulkan Cereal is written in Python as it is a well-known language with batteries included that is easy to edit by many developers. However, it's possible this can change in the future to an Ocaml / Haskell DSL as it will be much easier to specify generic and correct code generators.

Installation

Vulkan Cereal requires Python 3+ along with lxml for XML parsing.

Hello World (TODO: Build hello world example)

python cereal.py [path-to-vk.xml] [target-module.json]

Input

Cereal takes as input a Vulkan specification in the form of an XML document along with a target module that consists of:

• Target language
  • Tells cereal what language is used to generate code. Currently, only C++ is supported.
• Stream api definition
  • Tells cereal what code to generate when sending bytes to and from the remote
• Vulkan handle mappings
  • create mapping: what code to call when a new Vulkan object is created in the client and how to get the new handle.
  • wrap/unwrap: what code to call when we need access to the underlying version of the Vulkan object.
• API exceptions
  • no-streaming exception: APIs that are handled completely on one end or the other without serialization.
  • exception: APIs that are still streamed in some way, but pre-processed in a separate class, so that the entry point points to the preprocessor, not directly to the streaming version.

We will include some widely-used target modules as examples. Target modules are specified in .json format.