Trying to launch Zed editor on Fedora 41, but have following issue:

Zed uses Vulkan for rendering and requires a compatible GPU.
Currently you are using a software emulated GPU (llvmpipe (LLVM 19.1.5, 256 bits)) which will result in awful performance.
For troubleshooting see: https://zed.dev/docs/linux Set ZED_ALLOW_EMULATED_GPU=1 env var to permanently override.

Also similar warning for other apps:

Vulkan: ../src/amd/vulkan/radv_physical_device.c:2037: Device '/dev/dri/renderD128' is not using the AMDGPU kernel driver: Invalid argument (VK_ERROR_INCOMPATIBLE_DRIVER)

Does iMac 2011 GPU support it? How to check.. understand nothing in this subject.

Jan 31 · 11 months ago

7 Comments ↓

Vulkan probably doesn't support your gpu at all (that's the case for older gpus generally, since it didn't exist att). Yeah, that's why you don't write your only renderer in vulkan.

Thanks for the clear reply, at least I can play Half-Life 2 on Source engine, but not code using Zed, haha.

I am also running Fedora (KDE) on an iMac 2011. The graphics card it came with is a AMD Radeon HD 6970M. I think @undefined assessment is spot on: the GPU was born before Vulkan was a thing. :D Use the Helix Editor instead!

Yep, looks like that - not my luck to understand what do I miss with editor that does not require GPU :)

Vulkan was released in 2016.

@undefined Zed does in fact have an OpenGL renderer, using GLES as a fallback, as according to this issue:

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/13305

@ps You can try what someone13574 suggested, by compiling zed with the flag RUSTFLAGS="--cfg gles"

Zed is, afaik, basically waiting on Blade to have it auto-fallback at runtime to GLES: https://github.com/kvark/blade/issues/130

P.S. Helix and Zed are very different *styles* of editors, so they aren't interchangeable. People who are looking for something like Zed are not going to gravitate to Helix as an alternative, and vice versa, imo.

@clseibold2 oh ok. I don't really understand why people turn something like that off by default in the complile flags but whatever. I've heard people argue for that because gl brings in an implicit dependency to xlib but then they're using gles so ???

@undefined The Blade devs explain their weird reasoning for only having Vulkan, Metal, and GLES. GLES is intended as compatibility-only, and they see the Vulkan + Metal as a way to focus in on one API per platform. I don't agree with it, but meh! The Blade devs don't plan on supporting DirectX or OpenGl proper.

As for Zed itself, they implement Metal themselves for macOS, and then just use Blade for the moment for Windows + Linux, since Windows is not formally being worked on by the official team at the moment (although you can run Zed on Windows due to community work).

The Zed team's approach has basically been to focus on one platform at a time until that platform becomes stable with all the essential features. Right now they are working on Linux, and any Windows support has been done by the community mainly because the Windows community was impatient, lol. They plan on supporting DirectX when they get to Windows. When and if that happens, they will be able to completely remove Blade and replace it with their own Vulkan backend. Whether they'll add OpenGL when that happens, I have no idea, but there's issues open about it.