khr

KHR is a suffix used in the naming of official extensions maintained by the Khronos Group for its family of APIs, including OpenGL, OpenGL ES, Vulkan, WebGL, and OpenCL. The Khronos Group is a consortium that develops and coordinates open standards for graphics and compute, overseeing the extension mechanism that allows APIs to evolve between major releases.

Extensions bearing the KHR suffix are intended to be cross-vendor and broadly supported across different hardware and driver implementations. They reflect features that Khronos aims to standardize and promote compatibility for, rather than being tied to a single vendor. Some KHR extensions may be promoted to core features in future versions of the API, while others remain as stable, widely supported extensions.

Examples of KHR extensions include GL_KHR_debug and GL_KHR_texture_compression for OpenGL, and VK_KHR_ray_tracing_pipeline for Vulkan. These extensions provide additional functionality beyond the base API and are designed to be portable across multiple vendors.

Registration and usage follow the Khronos extension process. The Khronos Group maintains registries of extensions, including KHR extensions, with documentation on intended behavior, required core features, and deprecation notes. Developers enable these extensions through API-specific mechanisms, such as querying available extensions at runtime or listing required extension names during instance or device creation.

In practice, KHR extensions help ensure interoperability and a smoother path for feature adoption across different hardware and driver ecosystems, supporting the gradual evolution of graphics and compute APIs while maintaining broad compatibility.