RADV on the PlayStation 5

This is my fork of Mesa 26.2.0; all of its work is on branch main. It runs RADV, Mesa's Vulkan driver for AMD GPUs, with its ACO shader compiler, on the PlayStation 5's GPU from a homebrew title. The fork adds a winsys for the console, the layer RADV keeps the kernel behind, and changes RADV only where the console differs from a Linux GPU. Mesa's own README is README.rst.

It is route B of PS5_Vulkan's docs/VULKAN_1_4_PLAN.md. The goal is a genuine Vulkan 1.4 driver that passes the Khronos CTS on the console. It reports Vulkan 1.4, and the pinned 1.4 CTS (vulkan-cts-1.4.6.2) runs on the console in full; what it does not pass yet is listed, with its reason, in PS5_Vulkan's docs/CTS_GAPS.md.

It is what the titles ship: vkQuake since 2026-09-28, and PS5 RetroArch since v0.5.0-alpha.5, with its PSP, GameCube/Wii and PS2 cores rendering through it.

The winsys (src/amd/vulkan/winsys/ps5)

Part	What it does
radv_ps5_platform.c	GPU-visible direct memory. The CPU and the GPU see each allocation at one address. 32-bit buffers (shaders, descriptors) go in a 4 GiB window at 0x200000000, whose top 256 MiB is kept for ray-tracing capture and replay; other buffers go in a 256 GiB region at 0x4000000000. It also submits through sceAgcDriverSubmitDcb with the suspend point, and flushes the CPU's caches. A host build models all of it, so RADV runs on a PC for everything that does not need the GPU.
radv_ps5_winsys.c	The GPU description, in the amdgpu kernel's own form, completed by ac_gpu_info's derivations: GFX10.3 shader cores beside GC 10.1.3's fixed-function blocks, addressed as the console's tile maps were measured. It holds the process-wide queue, which the completion markers track.
radv_ps5_cs.c	Command streams kept in CPU memory. A submission copies all of them into one AGC submission, because the console faults a PM4 INDIRECT_BUFFER into title memory, and ends with a cache-flushing RELEASE_MEM that writes its sequence number.
radv_ps5_bo.c	Buffers: one direct-memory allocation each, always resident.
radv_ps5_sync.c	A binary sync object signalled by a submission's sequence number. Mesa's runtime builds timeline semaphores over it.

The swapchain is src/vulkan/wsi/wsi_common_videoout.c: VK_KHR_display on the console's VideoOut. It opens the output once per process, flips at vblank, and switches to 119.88 Hz where the title declares it and the display really refreshes at it (it measures, and goes back to 59.94 Hz otherwise).

Where RADV changes

Each change is general Vulkan behaviour for any application, not a case for one title:

• Geometry and tessellation shaders run as compute where the console's fixed-function blocks cannot run them, feeding the rasteriser from buffers.
• Mesh and task shaders. The GPU has neither per-primitive NGG parameters nor the command processor's task and mesh dispatch packets: mesh workgroups run in parts that share one run's outputs through a publish ring, and task shaders run on the graphics ring in chunks.
• Queues. Compute and transfer queue families are served from the graphics ring.
• Memory types for an integrated GPU: host-cached types and host pointers.
• Ray tracing: pipelines, ray queries, and group handles captured and replayed at their captured addresses.
• The shader cache (src/util): Mesa's disk cache in its database form, in the title's folder (/app0/radv-shader-cache). On the PS5 its folders and files stay open to the console's FTP service (0777 and 0666), a lookup does not create cache parts, and the database is opened exclusively, once per process: the console's file operations are slow, and titles read the cache from many threads at once (MESA_DISK_CACHE_DATABASE_EXCLUSIVE).

The branches these came in on (ps5-gs-compute, ps5-gs-tess, ps5-mesh, ps5-task, ps5-queues, ps5-memtypes, ps5-wsi, ps5-rt-replay, ps5-shader-cache and others) are merged into main, and PS5_Vulkan's docs/RADV_PHASE.md is the round-by-round record, with what the console measured for each.

What the winsys and these changes rely on was measured on the console, in PS5_Vulkan's probes and CTS runs. Gaps in the console's platform (kernel declarations, libc functions, the title heap) are not patched here: they live in the shared platform layer of my payload SDK fork, PS5_PayloadSDK.

Building

meson setup with -Dradv-winsys=ps5, for the console with PS5_Vulkan/tooling/radv/ps5-cross.ini and a static default library. PS5_Vulkan/tools/build-radv.sh builds the revision PS5_Vulkan pins (a debug archive with Mesa's assertions for the smoke test and the CTS, and build-radv.sh release for the titles) and records it, and PS5_Vulkan/tools/radv-link.sh links the archive into a title. The build takes zlib from Mesa's subproject, for the shader cache.

A Linux host build of the same option (a shared ICD for the Khronos loader) models the console. It runs API-level tests, the CTS's API groups and pipeline compiles on a PC.

Licence

Mesa's licences apply. The files this fork adds are MIT, like the code around them.

Optional broker and Zink integration

The opt-in broker overlay is owned here in ps5/broker, and built by PS5_Vulkan. Windows Zink now chooses IMMEDIATE only when advertised, otherwise FIFO. PS5_Vulkan also builds the PE64 WGL/Zink driver from a pinned revision of this fork; native EGL/OpenGL is a separate frontend.