# Fatal linker error when trying to link Vulkan SDK libvulkan.so on Linux

**URL:** <https://ziggit.dev/t/fatal-linker-error-when-trying-to-link-vulkan-sdk-libvulkan-so-on-linux/13403>\
**Category:** Help\
**Tags:** linker, linux, vulkan\
**Created:** [December 6, 2025, 3:31pm UTC](https://ziggit.dev/t/fatal-linker-error-when-trying-to-link-vulkan-sdk-libvulkan-so-on-linux/13403 "2025-12-06T15:31:39Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![floooh](https://ziggit.dev/user_avatar/ziggit.dev/floooh/32/2989_2.png) [@floooh](https://ziggit.dev/u/floooh)\
**Post date:** [December 6, 2025, 3:31pm UTC](https://ziggit.dev/t/fatal-linker-error-when-trying-to-link-vulkan-sdk-libvulkan-so-on-linux/13403/1 "2025-12-06T15:31:39Z")

</div>

I’m trying to link with Vulkan on Linux, and I’m getting the following error when linking:

```zig
error: fatal linker error: unhandled relocation type R_X86_64_JUMP_SLOT at offset 0x....

```

…where the libvulkan.so path is coming from the installed Vulkan SDK, e.g.:

```zig
/home/floh/vulkansdk/1.4.328.1/x86_64/lib/pkgconfig/../../lib/libvulkan.so

```

Searching for `R_X86_64_JUMP_SLOT` (on the archived Github issue list) didn’t yield any results (except this one which looks unrelated: [pthread\_sigmask relocation error · Issue #9899 · ziglang/zig · GitHub](https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/9899) ).

Any ideas what’s going on there? Is this a missing Zig linker feature?

PS: it works fine when linking the system’s Vulkan DLL (e.g. not sourcing the Vulkan SDK’s setup-env.sh script in .zshrc which I guess overrides the DLL paths).

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![floooh](https://ziggit.dev/user_avatar/ziggit.dev/floooh/32/2989_2.png) [@floooh](https://ziggit.dev/u/floooh)\
**Post date:** [December 6, 2025, 3:41pm UTC](https://ziggit.dev/t/fatal-linker-error-when-trying-to-link-vulkan-sdk-libvulkan-so-on-linux/13403/2 "2025-12-06T15:41:22Z")

</div>

PS: also sort of a semi-announcement: you can now try the new experimental sokol-gfx Vulkan backend on Linux with the sokol-zig bindings:

```zig
sudo apt install libvulkan-dev
git clone https://github.com/floooh/sokol-zig
cd sokol-zig
zig build -Dvulkan run-clear

```

(just make sure there’s no Vulkan-SDK in the path)