Ubuntu 14.10 Will Not Ship With Open-Source OpenCL Support

[nanonyme]

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

Is it like how Fedora 20 has mesa-vdpau-drivers that you have to install for VDPAU? (I dunno whether OpenCL is also packaged separately in Fedora. If it is, it's probably mesa-libOpenCL which is not installed in Fedora 20 by default either) So this in both sides seems to be just about default installation choices, not about capabilities.

[rikkinho]

yes it work

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

you only need to install the packs, nothing more, this is another no story invented by phoronix

[dh04000]

you only need to install the packs, nothing more, this is another no story invented by phoronix

libtxc-dxtn-s2tc is installed by default in Ubuntu 14.04.

mesa-vdpau-drivers is available if you do a quick search in Synaptic.

Nothing to see here folks, a no story by Moronix.

[blackiwid]

Wait, so you're saying Canonical should ship Mesa's OpenCL implementation, but knowing that it is not functional they should make sure that they disable OpenCL in the apps that they ship? That's really stupid and pointless.

you can blacklist stuff thats not working, like chromium blacklists linux completly hardware-acceleration, even it works on most systems, so they dont need to support gnu/linux because they see that as direct concurent to their propriatery linuxes.

btw normaly upstream makes a good job to blacklist stuff that works not on 1 of 1 millione pcs. for me they even go to far with that most of the time, but ok... so just install all like its in upstream, and all works fine like in fedora.

you cant be smarter then upstream else u would be upstream.

[blackiwid]

mesa-vdpau-drivers is available if you do a quick search in Synaptic.

Nothing to see here folks, a no story by Moronix.

mesa 9.1 did not support radeon vdpau, so no matter if thats installed or not, it cant work with amd hardware.

Even Fedora 19 did ship mesa 9.2 (beta or rc1 or something). That at least proves that ubuntu doesnt care about mesa at all bringing a 1 year old garbage version.

more than 1 year 1.5 years old

Mesa 9.1 Release Notes / February 22, 2013
trusty (14.04LTS) (devel): Developer documentation for Mesa
10.1.0-4ubuntu5

[Luke]

No promises, I haven't used high powered Intel stuff but here goes

Hey Luke, could you help me? I'd like to use ST2C/ST3C, since I imagine that games would preform better with it, but I have an optimus system(intel sandbridge gen 2 + nvidia 540m), which is very very sensitive to driver issues and version numbers. Would oibaf be a good solution for me, or would I be playing with fire. I absolutly CAN NOT afford down time on this laptop, I need it for work. Is there a way to install ST2C/ST3C without installing a entire driver? Maybe a single package?

As for Optimus, I don't know shit about it, can't make any promises whatseover about it. Sounds like it would crap out, maybe ask Oibaf directly? OK, on to the rest:

You could try manually downloading the ST2C or ST3C package from the PPA and installing it, but I think Mesa is compiled by Ubuntu without support for it. I don't know if that means it won't work, or just isn't compiled though in light of recent comments here. I doubt it would work, but you can try it.

OK, on to trying the whole PPA and how to revert from it, this REQUIRES some hacking skills!

If you can run PPA-purge from the command line, you can revert a PPA that breaks X. Find a PPA for something you don't use and that cannot break your system. Install the Ubuntu version first, then install PPA-purge. Now switch to a console with ctrl-alt-F2, and back to X with ctrl-alt-F7, to become familiar with doing so. Make sure you are able to remain connected to a network with X not running! OK, now install the PPA version of your test package, then switch to console and PPA-purge it. When you get this to work and NOT before it, you are ready for the nest step. Update your system so all packages are current to the day, then clear the package cache so you can save all the packages you are about to download.

First, reinstall everything associated with Mesa or X, doing a download-only if you want, just to have the packages in /var/cache/apt/archives if you later can't connect from console, say after a reboot. I recommend copying them and only them to a folder on the desktop if you think you might have network issues from the console!

Now add the oibaf PPA, and install all updates this brings in plus ST3C or ST2C. Restart X. If everything works you are good to go, but you might want to pin all of X and mesa if you are worried about later breakage. I recommend saving every package that came from the PPA in a folder somewhere so you can cd to the folder and sudo dpkg-i * everything in it if a later update goes bad. That's what I do and I don't have to pin known good versions.

Let's say you roll snakeyes and X won't restart. Now you use what you just learned about PPA-purging from the console, and revert all the X and Mesa packages to the versions you just saved in cache. I think it will still have to connect to the network to apt-get update for PPA purge to work. Without it you could still manually install all the old Ubuntu versions if you saved them to a folder.

As for fixing Optimus bugs, I can't help with that as I work mostly with AMD stuff

[brent]

btw normaly upstream makes a good job to blacklist stuff that works not on 1 of 1 millione pcs. for me they even go to far with that most of the time, but ok... so just install all like its in upstream, and all works fine like in fedora.

you cant be smarter then upstream else u would be upstream.

It's you (and Fedora) that want to ignore upstream. The OpenCL implementation is still very much work in progress, Mesa doesn't claim to even support OpenCL 1.0 properly. Frontend API support is incomplete and buggy, the runtime library is incomplete, backend support has various issues and is incomplete as well. Never mind the fact that only the radeonsi backend is usable at all...

My general experience with Mesa's OpenCL is that anything but trivial kernels fail in various ways. None of my OpenCL projects work with it - and these only target OpenCL 1.0.

[blackiwid]

It's you (and Fedora) that want to ignore upstream. The OpenCL implementation is still very much work in progress,

A new feature proposal for Fedora 21 is to bring basic OpenCL support to Fedora for OpenCL-enabled software and to further CL development in general. The feature proposal is to enable Mesa's OpenCL "Clover" state tracker by default and packaging key OpenCL compoonents like POCL and Beignet.

Fedora doesnt include upstream, Fedora is 90% of the cases upstream. Look at all important developers of important projects and u see very very often redhat as their employee and u see nearly never canonical.

And maybe NOW Opencl is not capable of much, I dont know that, but the feature-freeze of both distros is not today or tomorow, so its very likely that they will bring something at least in rare cases a bit useful else they would not include it, if its just empty c files that do nothing.

Feature Freeze — August 21st

Ubuntu 12.10 so in 1.5 months maybe it will support at least partialy gimp or libreoffice acceleration stuff.

Are you the core opencl developer from mesa?

And nice that u only try to argue against what u think are my mistakes and say nothing about stuff u cant defend, bringing a 1.5 year old mesa version in Ubuntu 14.04 but a 2 week old Nvidia drivers says all u need to know about Canonicals commitment to free software or opensource.

[brent]

And maybe NOW Opencl is not capable of much, I dont know that, but the feature-freeze of both distros is not today or tomorow, so its very likely that they will bring something at least in rare cases a bit useful else they would not include it, if its just empty c files that do nothing.

Clover OpenCL development is pretty slow. Not much is happening right now, so it's hard to believe anything substantial will change in the next couple of months. I regularly test it, and I can clearly say that Clover is only useful for hackers that want to work improving it right now.

And nice that u only try to argue against what u think are my mistakes and say nothing about stuff u cant defend, bringing a 1.5 year old mesa version in Ubuntu 14.04 but a 2 week old Nvidia drivers says all u need to know about Canonicals commitment to free software or opensource.

What are you talking about? Mesa 10.1 was released in March 2014, Ubuntu 14.04 came out about a month later.

[blackiwid]

What are you talking about? Mesa 10.1 was released in March 2014, Ubuntu 14.04 came out about a month later.

k Sorry did mix up wrong numbers 9.1 is from last year 10.1 not

Then I take it back. Still no matter if its pure evilness of canonical or just incompetence and wrong desitions, if you want a somewhat current free software stack and dont want to use nvidia blobs and such stuff... use fedora or maybe archlinux.

I at least advertise it here, and not only because of ideology or something both are technicaly better. Maybe u get in 1-2 years then a somewhat same experience in Ubuntu when they finaly replace their garbage upstart. But if they also make a ramfs for tmp I doubt it, and even if you ignore the fact that it doesnt deinstall old kernels automaticly and will fill up your partition with 1000 old kernels, and even if you can ignore mir and unity, its just a bad desktop distribution.

to need 5-10 ppas sucks, to not get the newest kernels sucks, except u are a huge unity fan ubuntu has nothing that all other big distros make 10 times better (at least on the desktop side), and maybe all nvidia guys can use ubuntu too, but u could use then also archlinux as example. but everybody that isnt a ubuntu fanboy or nvidia driver blob lover should not use this distro. Again even from technical point. The only reason to not switch is lazyness.

But that is only a suggestion I dont demand u to...