ogl beamforming

Building

The beamformer requires a compiler with support for _Float16. This means that GCC 12.1 or Clang 15 are the mininum supported compiler versions. Testing on compilers this old has been limited so you may run into bugs which do not occur with newer compilers. It is highly recommended that you use a more modern compiler (GCC 15+ or Clang 21+). Note that MSVC is not supported.

Bootstrap the build tool once and it will rebuild itself as needed:

cc -march=native -O3 build.c -o build

Then run the build tool:

./build

Debug Builds

Pass the build tool the --debug flag to get a build suitable for development/debugging:

./build --debug

Debug builds enable dynamic reloading of almost the entire program and you can make changes to most code and recompile without exiting the application.

Troubleshooting

Missing Vulkan Support

If the beamformer fails to start with a message like:

./ogl
[vulkan]  selecting device: llvmpipe (LLVM 15.0.7, 256 bits)
[vulkan]  fatal error: missing required device extensions:
[vulkan]      VK_KHR_external_memory
[vulkan]      VK_KHR_external_memory_win32

you may need to use the legacy branch:

git checkout legacy
./build

The legacy branch will be supported until the need for those extensions is removed but will not see feature or performance updates.

llvmpipe

If the beamformer starts with the llvmpipe device it means that your system is missing vulkan libraries. On Ubuntu this can be resolved with:

sudo apt install libvulkan1

Publication

This project has a paper covering some of the design and optimization up until commit 295b9c4. It is currently available as a preprint: arXiv:2512.11086. If you wish to refer to this project in any published work you can cite that article. The link will be updated once a full publication is available.