Intel Compute Runtime Offers "Preview" Support For Lunar Lake

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel Compute Runtime Offers "Preview" Support For Lunar Lake

Intel Compute Runtime 24.35.30872.22 released today as the newest tagged version of this open-source GPU compute stack providing oneAPI Level Zero and OpenCL support for Linux and Windows systems...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Compute-Runtime-LL

[lu_tze]

Would be worth mentioning, that everything up to the Ice Lake is marked as "legacy". Not only in compute-runtime, but also in igc. That's worrisome.

[AdamCetnerowski]

Thanks Michael for noticing the new release. A few comments form the Runtime & IGC teams.

Preview Quality – we used the Preview term as the ones we defined previously were not adequate for this specific case. It's not Experimental, it's not Pre-release and it is not yet qualified as Production. It is definitely healthy for testing and everyday use. WSL support will be added in next release in October (along with other improvements).

Legacy is used to indicate that we have permanently branched the code supporting those platforms. This will allow us to develop fixes & features for the newer platforms (from TGL onwards) faster and provide users an opportunity to use a lighter driver, if they don’t need the legacy support. The legacy driver will continue to be included in the packaging (and any critical fixes will come at the branchout point). This is model we intend to use periodically in the future to maintain a lean active codebase.

lu_tze - I am genuinely curious why this is “worrisome” so I can address concerns.

#IamIntel

[lu_tze]

Hello, Adam,

lu_tze - I am genuinely curious why this is “worrisome” so I can address concerns.

One part is, that the Ice Lage <-> Tiger Lake cutoff seems to be a bit premature; they are both relatively new hardware. Yes, I know that developers like to play with new toys (and Intel wants/needs to find some space for some savings), but this hardware was still sold relatively recently; it might still be on some markets and their users consider it new. When the NUC line was still under Intel, there were three different generations available simultaneously; or sometimes even more, when some models, like Hades Canyon were sold years after newer generations became available. So it may happen, that for quite a lot of users the support window might be shorter than the average Android device support! (Quite an achievement, actually).

Another issue is, that "legacy" slowly or quickly turns into "unsupported" and having increasingly higher hoops to jump for an issue to be considered bug, and not feature (or missing feature, that should be here). As an example, when Davinci Resolve doesn't run, is it bug, or is the ability to run Resolve a feature?

(Yes, I know that Resolve is not supported in Linux with Intel GPU by BMD. But that's part of the issue: it is supported on other platforms with Intel GPU. Why not on Linux? We are circling back to missing features; the OpenGL-OpenCL bridge was added this year and there was still some mismatch about tiling format).

Examples of products turning into legacy are AMD and GCN GPUs (Vega, Polaris), never fixing missing functionality, like ROCm support. Another example is Intel never finishing Vulkan driver for older GPUs (I own an Ivy Bridge-based Thinkpad, so I'm a bit salty here).

So, tldr: the worrysome part is, that relatively new or recently sold products are turned legacy, and that for the legacy, only the most serious CVEs would be fixed. Not the ordinary bugs or not erasing the gaps of missing functionality.

But thank you for your interest and commenting here. Not many vendors do that, I appreciate that.

[AdamCetnerowski]

So, tldr: the worrysome part is, that relatively new or recently sold products are turned legacy, and that for the legacy, only the most serious CVEs would be fixed. Not the ordinary bugs or not erasing the gaps of missing functionality.

Our development team has some discretion on which fixes to include in patch releases. If there is motivation to include something for a "legacy" platform, feel free to begin a discusion by opening an issue on our Github.