Vulkan SC Overview and Resources

What is Vulkan Safety Critical?

The design of Vulkan SC gives safety-critical application developers detailed control of GPU acceleration in a way that can be rigorously specified and tested to meet safety certification standards such as RTCA DO-178C Level A / EASA ED-12C Level A (avionics); IEC 61508 (industrial), IEC 62304 (Medical), and ISO 26262 ASIL D (automotive).

Link to specification: Khronos Vulkan SC Registry - The Khronos Group Inc

How Vulkan SC differs from Vulkan:

Vulkan SC is the combination of the Vulkan 1.2 functionality relevant to the safety-critical market and new market specific functionality that enhances the robustness of the specification by eliminating ignored parameters and undefined behaviors, and enables enhanced detection, reporting, and correction of run-time faults.

  • Streamlined: Remove non-essential runtime functionality (e.g. sparse memory, descriptor update templates and certain types of object deleters).
  • Deterministic: Predictable execution times and results (e.g. offline compilation of pipelines, static memory allocation and high degree of control over resource management with explicit synchronization).
  • Robust: Remove Ambiguity (No ignored parameters or undefined behaviors, enhanced fault handling and reporting functionality, rigorous Vulkan SC Conformance Test Suite and MISRA C alignment).

Additional information can be found in the blog post: Vulkan SC Overview - and how it is different from the Vulkan you already know.

Please visit our developer page on Vulkan SC for more details on platform availability and SDK: Vulkan SC | NVIDIA Developer

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