How to install intel graphics driver for using vulkan on Ubuntu 16.04

Environment:

Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. The machine uses Intel iris Pro Graphics 580 (Skylake GT4e) graphics processor.

Vulkan: 1.0.21.1

The problem, I installed the Vulkan 1.x SDK, and try to run the cube example. The error message I got is:

./cube
vkEnumerateInstanceExtensionProperties failed to find the VK_KHR_surface extension.

Do you have a compatible Vulkan installable client driver (ICD) installed?
Please look at the Getting Started guide for additional information.

After I installed mesa-util I had following error message:

FINISHME: Get correct values for VkPhysicalDeviceLimits
vulkan: No DRI3 support
Could not find a graphics and a present queue

Solutions I tried:

  1. https://gist.github.com/SaschaWillems/47be6970a3e99a3d30e1 (I used the Mesa 12.01 instead of Mesa master but I think 12.01 is good enough.)

  2. https://launchpad.net/~canonical-x/+archive/ubuntu/vulkan Still unable to run the cube example after the package is installed.

Any idea about how to get vulkan runs on Intel GPU?


I ran in to the same issue, recently. After following the two steps you mentioned, this last step allowed me to run the cube demo, although I have no idea if it has any power or performance repercussions.

  • Version: Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
  • Graphics card: Intel(R) HD Graphics 520 (Skylake GT2) (system76 lemur)

According to the Vulkan Setup tutorial, DRI3 stands for 'Direct Rendering Infrastructure 3; a Linux X-Windows extension for direct rendering'

I was able to enable it by following this ask and adding the following lines to /etc/X11/xorg.conf (the file didn't exist on my machine but I added it without issue)

Section "Device"
    Identifier  "Intel Graphics"
    Driver      "intel"
    Option      "SwapBuffersWait" "0"
    Option      "DRI" "3"
EndSection

Then restart your display manager with sudo service lightdm restart (or similar if you changed it) and you should be able to run the demos!


I didn't need to change xorg.conf to get Intel Vulkan drivers running on Ubuntu 16.04. I just used the padoka PPA and followed these steps:

The padoka PPA (linked in Sascha Willems's answer) worked for me as well, on Ubuntu 16.04.

After adding the PPA to apt, I did the following:

  1. sudo apt upgrade libglapi-mesa libgl1-mesa-dri vulkan-utils
  2. For some reason I had to create an extra symlink for the intel driver:
    sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/mesa/libvulkan_intel.so /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libvulkan_intel.so