It’s been over a year since Khronos started working on the Vulkan SC Ecosystem. Now that the component stack has reached a high level of maturity, it seemed appropriate to write an article about the secret sauce behind the Vulkan SC Ecosystem components that enabled us to leverage the industry-proven Vulkan Ecosystem components to provide corresponding developer tooling for the safety-critical variant of the API.

Vulkan SC was released by the Khronos Group in 2022 as the first of the new generation of explicit APIs to target safety-critical systems. The Vulkan SC 1.0 specification is based on the Vulkan 1.2 API and aims to enable safety-critical application developers access to and detailed control of the graphics and compute capabilities of modern GPUs. In order to accomplish that, Vulkan SC removes functionality from Vulkan 1.2 that is not applicable, not relevant, or otherwise not essential for safety-critical markets, and tweaks the APIs to achieve even more deterministic and robust behavior to meet safety certification standards.

The Vulkan SC Ecosystem components, such as the ICD Loader and Validation Layers, are not safety certified software components themselves, rather, they are developer tools intended to be used by application developers writing safety-critical applications using the Vulkan SC API. Building on the success of the corresponding ecosystem components available for the Vulkan API, the goal for the Vulkan SC Ecosystem is to leverage the tremendous engineering effort that went (and still goes) into those in order to create a comparably comprehensive suite of developer tools for the safety-critical variant of the API, amended with additional features specific to Vulkan SC. Reaching that goal, however, came with its own set of challenges…