Vulkan, glfw and macOS: vkCreateInstance returns VK_ERROR_INITIALIZATION_FAILED

Question

I'm going through Vulkan tutorial and stuck on creating an instance I'm using macOS 10.15.6 (19G2021) on my MacBook Pro 15 (2019) All environment variables as VK_ICD_FILENAMES and VK_LAYER_PATH are set correctly as per tutorial.

glfwVulkanSupported() returns True glfwGetRequiredInstanceExtensions(&glfwExtensionCount) returns NULL

Here is my main.cpp:

#define GLFW_INCLUDE_VULKAN
#include <GLFW/glfw3.h>

#include <iostream>
#include <stdexcept>
#include <cstdlib>

#include <stdio.h>

const uint32_t WIDTH = 800;
const uint32_t HEIGHT = 600;

class HelloTriangleApplication {
public:
    void run() {
        initWindow();
        initVulkan();
        mainLoop();
        cleanup();
    }

private:
    void initWindow() {
        glfwInit();
        
        glfwWindowHint(GLFW_CLIENT_API, GLFW_NO_API);
        glfwWindowHint(GLFW_RESIZABLE, GLFW_FALSE);
        window_ = glfwCreateWindow(WIDTH, HEIGHT, "Vulkan", nullptr, nullptr);
    }
    
    // initiate vulkan objects
    void initVulkan() {
        if (glfwVulkanSupported()) {
            std::cout << "Vulkan Supported" << std::endl;
            createInstance();
        }
    }

    void createInstance() {
        VkApplicationInfo appInfo{};
        appInfo.sType = VK_STRUCTURE_TYPE_APPLICATION_INFO;
        appInfo.pApplicationName = "Hello Triangle";
        appInfo.applicationVersion = VK_MAKE_VERSION(1, 0, 0);
        appInfo.pEngineName = "No Engine";
        appInfo.engineVersion = VK_MAKE_VERSION(1, 0, 0);
        appInfo.apiVersion = VK_API_VERSION_1_0;
        
        VkInstanceCreateInfo createInfo{};
        createInfo.sType = VK_STRUCTURE_TYPE_INSTANCE_CREATE_INFO;
        createInfo.pApplicationInfo = &appInfo;

        uint32_t glfwExtensionCount = 0;
        const char** glfwExtensions;
        
        glfwExtensions = glfwGetRequiredInstanceExtensions(&glfwExtensionCount);
        printf("glfwExtensions %d\n", glfwExtensionCount);
        
        createInfo.enabledExtensionCount = glfwExtensionCount;
        createInfo.ppEnabledExtensionNames = glfwExtensions;

        createInfo.enabledLayerCount = 0;
        
        VkResult result = vkCreateInstance(&createInfo, nullptr, &instance_);
        if (result != VK_SUCCESS) {
            printf("failed to create instance with error_code %d", result);
            throw std::runtime_error("failed to create instance!");
        } else {
            std::cout << "Instance for application " << appInfo.pApplicationName << " created successfully";
        }
    }
    
    void mainLoop() {
        while (!glfwWindowShouldClose(window_)) {
            glfwPollEvents();
        }
    }

    void cleanup() {
        glfwDestroyWindow(window_);
        
        glfwTerminate();
    }
    
    GLFWwindow* window_;
    VkInstance instance_;
};

int main() {
    HelloTriangleApplication app;

    try {
        app.run();
    } catch (const std::exception& e) {
        std::cerr << e.what() << std::endl;
        return EXIT_FAILURE;
    }

    return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}

Answer 1

I run ./install_vulkan.py previously, so environment variables were already set. My guess is that trying to override them in XCode to a local sdk path confused the dependencies. So I've just gone down the path where I have environment variables set by the script and the library copied to /usr/local/lib (Alternate methods using system paths) https://vulkan.lunarg.com/doc/sdk/1.2.148.1/mac/getting_started.html

Answer 2

I was stumbling into this myself and I found removing any relative file paths like ~/{stuff} and replacing them with the actual path /user/{user}/{stuff} fixed my problem after bashing my head in for half a day and considering completely restarting on linux. This was happening in my environment variables under my schema in xcode