Description

The vulkan backend fails to initialize in renderdoc on wayland.

I am not sure where the responsibility lie between wgpu, winit and renderdoc. I'll document what I know here for future reference because I periodically forget and re-investigate the issue:

• The error happens in create_surface_from_wayland, VK_KHR_wayland_surface is missing.
• I see the following extensions present:
  • "VK_KHR_surface"
  • "VK_KHR_xlib_surface"
  • "VK_KHR_xcb_surface"
  • "VK_EXT_debug_utils"
  • "VK_EXT_swapchain_colorspace"
  • "VK_KHR_get_physical_device_properties2"
• There is a closed issue on renderdoc's repsoitory: vkCreateInstance fails with VK_ERROR_EXTENSION_NOT_PRESENT due to lack of VK_KHR_wayland_surface extension support on Ubuntu 22.04 baldurk/renderdoc#2711
  • The resolution is that wayland is currently not supported in renderdoc and it is up to the application to check the existence of the extensions.

I wonder whether when we get to create_surface_from_wayland it is still possible initialize the surface via another method or whether the presence of the extension should be checked earlier. Ideally wgpu applications would work in renderdoc with wayland without having to know about forcing the X11 backend.

Workaround

As far as local testing goes, using winit's x11 backend seems to be a sufficient workaround (set the WINIT_UNIX_BACKEND environment variable to "x11").

Repro steps

Run any of this repository's examples in renderdoc with the WGPU_BACKEND environment variable set to "vulkan" under wayland.

Platform

Linux with wayland