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 https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Headers)

• Vulkan header files (also mirrored at https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Headers)

• Related tools and scripts.

The authoritative public repository is located at https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Docs/. It hosts a public Issue tracker, and outside developers can file proposed patches (Pull Requests) against the Specification, subject to approval by Khronos.

If in doubt where to submit your Issue, consult the https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Ecosystem repo.

Branch Structure

The current Specification is maintained in the master branch 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 master 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
COPYING.md            Copyright and licensing information
CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md    Code of Conduct
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
config/               Asciidoctor configuration, CSS, and index generator
images/               Images (figures, diagrams, icons)
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.