Open-Source OpenCL Isn't Even Ready For Fedora

The open-source OpenCL acceleration within Mesa/Gallium3D isn't even in a good enough state to be accepted in the usually bleeding-edge Fedora Linux distribution.

David Airlie of Red Hat wrote in a mailing list thread entitled Any ETA for OpenCL support in Mesa? his response to packaging the open-source OpenCL support for Fedora:

I made a first pass at packaging it and starting feeling ill at the pain,

the big problem was pacakging libclc, its horribly developed, got what I think is a handwritten build system in python (or a port of one), requires a fair few patches to even get close to being useful.

I'm sort of waiting for AMD to say when they think things are more ready, from a radeon pov, and from what I know nouveau support still isn't merged into mesa.

So at the moment I get the feeling that you could probably run clinfo and not much more.

Dave.

So even just packaging this OpenCL support for the Fedora desktop causes pain. But yes the actual implementation too is quite poor at this point. There is the merged Radeon Gallium3D compute support and the ongoing work on the Nouveau side, but it's still very early and not actually doing much... OpenCL in Mesa 8.1 will still be disappointing, but maybe by the next release in early 2013 there will be some form of usable support, along with OpenGL 3.1 compliance.