# Vulkan Ecosystem Components
*Version 1.0, January 25, 2016*
This project provides Khronos offical ICD loader and validation layers for Vulkan developers on Windows and Linux.
## Introduction
Vulkan is an Explicit API, enabling direct control over how GPUs actually work. No (or very little) validation
or error checking is done inside a Vulkan driver. Applications have full control and responsibility. Any errors in
how Vulkan is used often result in a crash. This project provides standard validation layers that can be enabled to ease development by
helping developers verify their applications correctly use the Vulkan API.
Vulkan supports multiple GPUs and multiple global contexts (VkInstance). The ICD loader is necessary to support multiple GPUs and the VkInstance level Vulkan commands. Additionally, the loader manages inserting Vulkan layer libraries,
including validation layers between the application and the ICD.
The following components are available in this repository:
- Vulkan header files
- [*ICD Loader*](loader/)
- [*Validation Layers*](layers/)
- Demos and tests for the loader and validation layers
## How to Build and Run
[BUILD.md](BUILD.md)
includes directions for building all the components, running the validation tests and running the demo applications.
Information on how to enable the various Validation layers is in
[layers/README.md](layers/README.md).
Architecture and interface information for the loader is in
[loader/LoaderAndLayerInterface.md](loader/LoaderAndLayerInterface.md).
## License
This work is released as open source under a MIT-style license from Khronos including a Khronos copyright.
See LICENSE.txt for a full list of licenses used in this repository.
## Acknowledgements
While this project has been developed primarily by LunarG, Inc; there are many other
companies and individuals making this possible: Valve Corporation, funding
project development; Google providing significant contributions to the validation layers;
Khronos providing oversight and hosting of the project.