libGPULayers provides tooling to create new Vulkan layer drivers, allowing you to quickly generate new layers suitable for creation of new developer tools or for ad hoc experiments during development.
In addition, we provide a number of pre-built layers that have been built using this framework. These layers might be used as standalone tools in their own right, or might be used alongside other Arm tools such as Arm Performance Studio.
Layer drivers provide a standard mechanism to inject diagnostic functionality between an application and the underlying graphics driver. Layer drivers intercept the graphics API calls from the application, perform their diagnostic function, and then call into the underlying graphics driver to actually perform the requested operation. The ability to see, and change, the calls into the native driver makes layers an exceptionally powerful tool for debugging both functional and performance issues.
Layer drivers are designed in to the Vulkan API, and they are the mechanism for common workflows such as error checking using the Vulkan Validation Layer (VVL), but they are also a general purpose mechanism suitable for all kinds of developer tooling.
We help many application developers to investigate issues during their
development cycle. We rarely get access to application source code for these
investigations, and cannot change drivers on production devices. Layer drivers
provide us with an invaluable mechanism to monitor and make modifications to
application API usage without needing to modify the application itself. The
GPU Support layer in this project is a tool we use during technical
support investigations to quickly triage problems.
We also use layer drivers as a way to develop new API-aware debug and profiling
capabilities. The performance layers in this repository, such as the
GPU Profile and GPU Timeline layers, are used to profile performance,
or add API-aware annotations to performance captures made using other tooling.
As you might be able to tell, we find layers exceptionally useful, and we often want to create ad hoc layers to use for one-off experiments. Creating a new layer from scratch requires a lot of code and is fiddly to get right, with obscure errors when it doesn't work, so we wrote a tool to automate layer creation. This final part of this project is this layer generation tooling, which you use to quickly create a new layer that is ready to deploy.
This library is currently tested on devices running Android or Linux, and using Arm® Immortalis™ and Arm Mali™ GPUs. Contributions adding support for other platforms are welcome.
This project is licensed under the MIT license. By downloading any component from this repository you acknowledge that you accept terms specified in the LICENSE.txt file.
Common documentation
- Building a layer
- Creating a new layer
- Updating an existing layer
- Running using a layer on Android
- Running using a layer on Linux
- About layers design notes
- Frequently asked questions
Layer documentation
If you have issues with the layer framework, or the prebuilt layers, please raise them in the project's GitHub issue tracker.
If you have any questions about Arm GPUs, application development for Arm GPUs, or general mobile graphics development or technology, please submit them on the Arm Community graphics forums.
Copyright © 2024-2026, Arm Limited and contributors.