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-Projects list on the Vulkan-Web-Registry 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 (1.3, 1.2, 1.1, and 1.0), and incorporating any desired set of extensions. Each published update is tagged in the form 1.3.release where release is a constantly incrementing release number and 1.3 is the latest published version of the API. The last public spec update prior to Vulkan 1.3 is tagged v1.2.???.

The last state of the default branch in Khronos' internal GitLab server, before 1.3 content was merged into it, is tagged 1.2-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.adoc        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`) as well as XML for non-Vulkan
                      data structures used with Video extensions (`video.xml`)
registry.adoc         Source for documentation of the 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.