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Ubuntu 14.10 Will Not Ship With Open-Source OpenCL Support

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  • Ubuntu 14.10 Will Not Ship With Open-Source OpenCL Support

    Phoronix: Ubuntu 14.10 Will Not Ship With Open-Source OpenCL Support

    While Fedora 21 is planning for open-source OpenCL support "out of the box", the same can't be said for Ubuntu 14.10. Ubuntu developers aren't looking for any stock OpenCL support be made available in the next distribution release...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    Fedora is moving ahead of Ubuntu in many ways. Maybe it's time for Ubuntu to reconsider their strategy.

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    • #3
      Originally posted by phoronix View Post
      Phoronix: Ubuntu 14.10 Will Not Ship With Open-Source OpenCL Support

      While Fedora 21 is planning for open-source OpenCL support "out of the box", the same can't be said for Ubuntu 14.10. Ubuntu developers aren't looking for any stock OpenCL support be made available in the next distribution release...

      http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTczMzE
      Wow, Ubuntu becomes the new microsoft or maybe google (android) of course they cant make out of a gnu/linux a completly proprietary closed source os. But more or less all that the gpl allow them on evil stuff they do.

      Like google in android they first released more or less complete opensource stack, but from day 1 not really opensource, now they more and more replace peaces after peaces with proprietary software. Of course they cant close up everything like the kernel because the gpl dont allows that, but what they can do they do to close stuff up.

      Again lets see what we have on the android land, somehow they could make gpl compatible closed'source gpu drivers, I guess they are 100% userland drivers with the mir like driver architecture? So what was again the only reason that they wanted MIR instead of Wayland to support better such proprietary drivers.

      So when this drivers load they will remove completly in the long run all free drivers and include the nonfree drivers directly. Nvidia I am shure will make such driver or has one already that is also completly in userland.

      The only reason they cant remove all drivers for now is intel. But arm steals much market share from x86 year after year, in the long run even intel could be obsolote.

      the problem is not us, we know this we either fix the ubuntu standard installtion or better dont touch this shit distro and have no problem with that.

      The problem is the end user. Ok people that use linux and dont know (much) about it with android dont understand the diffrences anyway.

      But the few users that try GNU Linux when they ask around whats a easy linux distro they today at least hear always ubuntu. So for them GNU/Linux = Ubuntu, so even today where its at least somewhat technical fair comparsion of the blobs and the free drivers, many say nvidias driver support is best, but at least this users will have black screens after booting when they update a kernel or other problems. AT least they have to install explizitly the blob and at least they understand hey I have to install a proprietary software, they have at least a change to ask themselv is that a good idea to install a driver blob propriatary on a opensource or free Linux system.

      And another problem, if then their linux gets unstable or soemthing, they at least maybe see the problem from nvidia not from "linux".

      So no matter what if the blob works very good or its very bad both hurts gnu/linux.

      Its a bit like parents that have a chidl and the mother when the kid does something good says "our son" and if fails at something she says to the father "your son" we see that even today that people troll linux when the nvidia blob is the problem.

      So to make it short, Canonical pushes proprietary software advertises it, even makes the free drivers look even worse then they are on some points. while making the proprietary drivers first citizens.

      I replaced it a year ago or so on all my and my families pcs, but of course that alone does not change much, except less hurt and less work needed to make out of a standard ubuntu a usable free gnome desktop with wayland and a full free driver stack.

      We should start to fight active against canonical, ignoriing not accepting patches as far as it makes sense is a good start, but thats not enough, lets try to replace every advantage people see in ubuntu by other distros, even I dont see whats that supposed ot be, maybe better doku or hardware-support wikis or somthing like that.

      Technicaly I was astonished how far ahead archlinux and fedora is, so I would never switch back, even from technicaly only reasons:

      1. automaticly deinstalls old kernels while installing newer ones
      2. tmpfs is a ramfs, which reduces writes on ssd and makes browsing and such stuff faster
      3. getting newer software often faster, fedora 20 kernel 3.14.9 soon 3.15 ubuntu 14.04 kernel 3.13 mesa 10.1.5 vs 10.1.0...
      4. no package for profile-sync-daemon in ubuntu.
      5. systemd vs no systemd yet
      6. full gnome-support no older packages often nautilus at the moment I see spontan that gnome-boxes 3.8 instead of 3.10 is in current ubuntu. And if fedora would not have skipped on release the current stable fedora would have of course gnome 3.12. And thats what as example archlinux has now.
      7. commitment to freedom, no sabotaged disable-all-features compiled drivers.

      So all you ubuntu lovers tell me/us why do u all use ubuntu and not other distros? And if you say having older packages is a advantage, go to the original debian... there u get that feature delivered best.

      Or is it at least mostly the urban myth that ubuntu is (still) the most user-friendly distro, or are all statistics that 90% of all pc users dont have a nvidia grafic card in their system a myth and u want all have the best proprietary drivers support?

      Or is it the myth I sadly belived myself that rpm format just sucks or that u have dependency hell or something like that, what was true 10 years ago, maybe even 15 years ago. But is not today.

      Or do u really see any real features ubuntu has that other distros dont have? if so we should try to deliver that as example in fedora and try to push ubuntu away from most used distro before it gets too commercial. Or do we have to at least mark it as a seperate thing, rms says we should call every distro with gnu tools basicly GNU/Linux even when they do extremly evil stuff, so calling it non-gnu does not work, do we need wordings like proprietary gnu/linux or bastardised gnu/linux all to long I guess.

      I guess from rms standpoint there is no big difference from fedora and ubuntu, there are trisquel and some full free gnu/linuxes and all other are evil.

      And then when people dont use gnu tools it dont gets that name, maybe we should make some labels like we have it on food. so we could call it a redlinux and most others a yellow-linux and trisquel and co replicant green-linux.

      Something liek that. Ok hope this mega-post is not to long that it will get submited

      Comment


      • #4
        One more reason for using mesa from PPA

        Ubuntu disables so much of mesa by default that I never use their versions,I have been using instead either oibaf or xorg-edgers versions for years. No VDPAU, no ST2C/ST3C, no OpenCL either. Almoist like using only Ubuntu's default video codecs but a lot harder to fix.

        For a default installer the focus should be on avoiding the black screen with Radeon HD6450/Linux 3.14 type of bug for obvious reasons, but anytime Fedora is able to enable something Ubuntu should be able to do the same.

        Leaving out OpenCL and requiring replacement of Mesa just because GIMP and other programs that can use it are not on the installer disk is NUTS in my opinion, unless enabling it causes at least one graphics card to refuse to modeset or refuse to use 3d acceleration. It means every user that wants OpenCL suppport needs to be able to use PPA versions and needs to be able to fix breakage on PPA updates, I recommend always having the complete package set from the last known good version around just in case.

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        • #5
          Originally posted by Luke View Post
          no ST2C/ST3C
          You perfectly know why those not included by default...

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          • #6
            I don't use Ubuntu (but Debian which have it builded) nor opencl, but if i look here



            OpenCL looks like to me halfly maded but only for radeon, nouveu looks like mostly not even touched that .

            So according to that i also don't think it is not much need to build that .

            Also reading on Arch wiki, they say "Arch Linux does currently (April 2014; Mesa 10.1.0; LLVM 3.4) not build Mesa with OpenCL support."



            Not sure is that still true, but even if it is now... why so, it is not worse if they have it, but is also nothing so much special even it is there .
            Last edited by dungeon; 02 July 2014, 10:28 PM.

            Comment


            • #7
              It's still one more reason to user PPA versions

              Originally posted by _SXX_ View Post
              You perfectly know why those not included by default...
              One implemtation of the video compresson library (ST2C) works around that bullshit software patent and isn't even effected. I use the version(ST3C) that is open source and ignores the software patents illegal in most countries other than my own. Allowing mesa to link against it certainly should not be an issue so long as the patent-busting version of the library is not itself shipped by default. Otherwise Totem and Firefox would have to not support H264 even if it's on the machine.

              I will always prefer full-featured PPA versions of anything over versions neutered for fear of illegal software patents. Hell, maybe Mint could compile their own mesa and fuck the patents, like they do with video codecs. It's still FOSS if it is open source and the only copyrights are under GPL, BSD, or any other non-closed license.

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              • #8
                so much confusion for nothing

                opencl and vdpau drivers for mesa are in soft repos, you simple install if you want

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                • #9
                  I was under the impression Mesa was being compiled without support for them

                  Originally posted by rikkinho View Post
                  opencl and vdpau drivers for mesa are in soft repos, you simple install if you want
                  Are you saying they are in repo and will work with Ubuntu's main mesa install? I was under the impression from the original bug report that Mesa was compiled without support for these drivers, as it is known to have been in the past for ST2C/ST3C support

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                  • #10
                    Has Phoronix done any benchmarking of OpenCL performance for free GPU drivers vs. proprietary ones?

                    Sure, we know free drivers are quite bad for graphics, but do they do well for computing?

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