Intel's Beignet OpenCL Has Uncertain Future

Last week I wrote about Beignet as Intel's OpenCL Linux implementation for "Ivy Bridge" hardware. While the code was recently open-sourced, the future direction of this project is unknown.

The earlier Phoronix article covers all of the important details, but Ben Segovia passed along some unfortunate news on Wednesday. Ben is no longer working for Intel and the future direction of his Beignet project isn't known. "I am the one who used to work on this code. Unfortunately, I am working for Intel anymore. I am not sure what the future will be for this code base."

Ben went on to say, "The code basically contains both the run-time code which is basically the OpenCL host code (clKernel*, clProgram*) and a compiler back-end which is responsible to take bits of LLVM IR code and to output IvyBridge ISA from it."

Fortunately, all of the work going into enabling open-source OpenCL on Linux for Ivy Bridge is part of the documentation that Intel already released to the public. Ben says, "This code base only uses documented parts of the chip so I guess that anybody motivated to play with it should be able to do so."

Hopefully work on Beignet will be revived or Intel's Open-Source Technology Center has other plans for bringing open-source OpenCL support to the Linux desktop with their hardware.