SDL 2.0.6 Released With Vulkan Helpers, DRM/KMS Driver

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Gaming on 23 September 2017 at 03:15 PM EDT. 6 Comments
LINUX GAMING
SDL 2.0.6 was released on Friday as the latest feature update for this widely-used library that allows for more cross-platform portability of applications and games centered around input, audio, and video helpers.

SDL 2.0.6 has been gearing up for release with SDL 2.0.5 being about one year old. As such, there are a lot of changes in this point release that still preserves API compatibility with older 2.0.x releases.

SDL 2.0.6 features QNX7 support, an experimental JACK audio driver, a default Steam Controller mapping for Linux, updated game controller, and cross-platform Vulkan helpers.

The Vulkan support in SDL 2.0.6 isn't some magical addition to make it suddenly much easier to bring OpenGL games to Vulkan but rather is about allowing better cross-platform setup of Vulkan with taking care of some of the platform-specific setup differences for Vulkan on Windows, Linux, and even macOS when using MoltenVK. It's a step in the right direction and aide to those game developers wanting to target Vulkan support across multiple platforms. See this earlier posting for more 2.0.6 details.

SDL 2.0.6 also has an experimental KMS/DRM video driver for targeting these kernel display APIs directly if wanting to run an SDL2 app directly off them in the embedded space.

More details on SDL 2.0.6 via the official release announcement.
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