shournal VS deko3d

shournal is a (file-) journal for your shell and now allows for even faster queries with less typing overhead.

Check it out on github

Check out the new release on github.

At the institute I work at intermediate results are also often not documented. It is sometimes even worse than you described so that the researcher have difficulties to reproduce their own work. Therefore they hired me to develop shournal in order to have at least some safety net to reconstruct command-line work on the shell. Maybe it can help your team too? https://github.com/tycho-kirchner/shournal

If you just want a low level graphics api, and you don’t care about some of the abstractions Vulkan offers, you might consider checking out Deko 3D. It’s a stripped down version of Vulkan for the NVidia Tegra X1

That's not exactly correct. This is register maps for the 3d engine (also called class), what you describe would be closer to the shader ISA.

In driver code you'll see them building command buffers that set registers in those classes to certain values. It could be the RGBA values of the clear color, or a virtual address in the GPU space.

This documents the names of these registers. This makes reverse engineering somewhat easier as you don't really have to guess anymore. But in most cases it was pretty clear from the start, and for some generations those were already well documented by open source efforts. One of best known gens is probably Maxwell since it was used in the Nintendo Switch, see for instance [1] (or code in yuzu/Ryujinx) which is the equivalent of those headers NV published.

However this isn't a very big step in documenting their GPUs. The exact functions of those registers aren't explained, but most importantly the shader ISA isn't documented at all, which is essential to build a good open-source driver.

Source: I have reverse engineered some driver code for Maxwell (and used similar headers to write drivers for nvdec and nvjpg).

[1] https://github.com/devkitPro/deko3d/blob/master/source/maxwe...

They're 100% wrong. There are homebrew emulators that work on the switch just fine and have GPU access and there's also things like this: https://github.com/devkitPro/deko3d

Unfortunately not much info is publicly available about it. Recently a homebrew rendering API was released that builds upon reverse engineering efforts: https://github.com/devkitPro/deko3d.