Ubuntu 14.10 Will Not Ship With Open-Source OpenCL Support

[_SXX_]

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

I have weird feeling that there nothing to compare because open source drivers likely don't work with real apps.
Though it's would be interesting to see how Beignet perform because I always only tried to use OpenCL on R600g.

[finalzone]

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.

"rpm dependencies hell" was a myth considering at that time, its based distributions lacked a global package manager for rpm in case of Red Hat Linux other than up2date and alternatively apt for rpm until its replacement by yum when it becomes Fedora.
Mandriva has urpmi but unusued outside that distribution.
Debian has dependencies hell when only using dpkg commands lacking information about missing dependencies especially with the use of third party repositories.

[Calinou]

Typo: It's Bitcoin, not Bit Coin, Bit coin or BitCoin.

[brent]

Uhm, guys, have you ever tried to use Mesa OpenCL? It's really incomplete on both the API level and backend level. You can't really do any useful work with it yet. Skipping OpenCL support is at this point *perfectly fine*.

[blackiwid]

Uhm, guys, have you ever tried to use Mesa OpenCL? It's really incomplete on both the API level and backend level. You can't really do any useful work with it yet. Skipping OpenCL support is at this point *perfectly fine*.

Are there any disadvantages if they would not diable it? No!

Would there be a advantage when u activate it, yes, many developers use ubuntu and with that activated they can play around and get used to the api or something.

So its no technical desition its polical desition, and the other example with vdpau that clearly is a big advantage they did disable too, makes this look even more a politic try move to advertise proprietary software (driver blobs).

[brent]

Are there any disadvantages if they would not diable it? No!

That's seriously wrong. A broken implementation is worse than no implementation. Applications that try to use Mesa OpenCL will most likely crash. And worse, if there's a bug in the backend, it might cause systems crashes. Programmers that just want to use the implementation will currently have a very frustrating experience, too.

[blackiwid]

That's seriously wrong. A broken implementation is worse than no implementation. Applications that try to use Mesa OpenCL will most likely crash. And worse, if there's a bug in the backend, it might cause systems crashes. Programmers that just want to use the implementation will currently have a very frustrating experience, too.

Thats wrong, canonical can disable in the apps they also deliver the use of opencl, thats the right place to do that.

[brent]

Thats wrong, canonical can disable in the apps they also deliver the use of opencl, thats the right place to do that.

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.

[nomadewolf]

Canonical is inventing their own OpenCL which is better, because stuff and sh!t...

[dh04000]

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.

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?