Introduced two years ago was the Intel/Codeplay oneAPI Construction Kit for helping to bring SYCL support to new hardware. As part of that the oneAPI Construction Kit was brought to RISC-V and other platforms. Out this week is now oneAPI Construction Kit 5.0 and sadly it drops Vulkan API support.
While the oneAPI Construction Kit is a framework around building off open standards and enabling the SYCL programming model and other open specifications across diverse accelerators/platforms, the oneAPI Construction Kit 5.0 release gutted all of the Vulkan API support. This was done as the Vulkan support was considered incomplete and rather investing in completing it, the developers felt it best off to remove the support to avoid the maintenance burden and any user confusion over its incomplete state.
Removing the Vulkan API support from the oneAPI Construction Kit was laid out in this RFC.
“Vulkan API is incomplete and requires installing Vulkan SDK, as well as being enabled by default. It has a maintenance and design overhead and is not being used, as well as leading to customer confusion. It is proposed that it should be removed in its entirety.”
That was approved of and now oneAPI Construction Kit 5.0 is now released with the Vulkan SPI support removed. Users wanting Vulkan support are encouraged to fork from Construction Kit 4.0. The 5.0 release drops support for older versions of LLVM and also brings various other changes.
