Merged today to the Intel open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver in Mesa 26.0 is introducing a shader VMA allocator. Long story short this new allocator steps toward enabling Vulkan ray-tracing capture/replay support, which can come in hand for debugging issues with Vulkan ray-tracing on Intel graphics hardware under Linux and similarly to assist in optimizing for better performance.

Hitting Mesa Git this evening is anv: shader vma allocator. It isn’t a particularly sexy feature but the commit as part of that MR making the change-over explains:

"Switched to the new VMA allocator that provides explicit GPU VA [virtual address] control via util_vma_heap.

This is architectural preparation for ray tracing capture/replay, which requires the ability to reserve and allocate shaders at specific VAs. The state pool’s free-list design makes VA reservation difficult to add, while the new chunk allocator is designed for explicit VA management from the ground up."

Confirmed as well in the comments that this now merged code plus this 10 month old merge request for RT capture/replay handles is enough to get capture/replay support working with Vulkan ray-tracing shaders. This is confirmed to be working with that additional merge request in RenderDoc:

This will hopefully come in handy for both driver developers and game/engine developers for analyzing Vulkan ray-tracing issues and helping to optimize for better performance once that follow-on capture/replay handles MR lands. Hopefully that will happen in time for next quarter’s Mesa 26.0 release.