There's Finally An Easy Way To Track Mesa's OpenCL Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: There's Finally An Easy Way To Track Mesa's OpenCL Support

While Mesa is most well known for providing OpenGL and Vulkan open-source drivers on Linux systems, via the "Clover" Gallium3D state tracker is also maturing support for OpenCL. But until now it hasn't been straight-forward to track the state of Mesa's OpenCL supported versions and extensions...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mesa-OpenCL-Features-State

[MadeUpName]

I have given up all hope of ever seeing a non vendor supplied openCL stack with image support that works. Redhat is working on getting NVidia working for mega clients in the data center but that won't include image support and probably won't work with cards designed for consumers and workstations.

[ripper81]

I hope that there will be support for post GCN AMD GPU's. RDNA and RDNA 2 based AMD GPU's are completely unsupported by MESA OpenCL right now. The AMDGPU-PRO drivers and ROCm are not an option for me either because they are both not available for my distribution or to difficult to handle.

[Aisyk]

I hope that there will be support for post GCN AMD GPU's. RDNA and RDNA 2 based AMD GPU's are completely unsupported by MESA OpenCL right now. The AMDGPU-PRO drivers and ROCm are not an option for me either because they are both not available for my distribution or to difficult to handle.

Same thing for me ! (PopOS 20.10 and RX 5500 XT user) Limited to OpenCL 1.1. :/

[schmidtbag]

"Finally" is an appropriate word here. I'm surprised to see OpenCL is still so far behind.

[Soul_keeper]

A big part of the problem is OpenCL is largely unknown to the general public imo.
Us tech savy people know what it is, but the average joe/joan will look at you with a blank stare if you mention OpenCL or any of the various other terms: gpgpu, cuda, shaders, etc.
The demand on a distro level or from the average PC user just isn't high enough. Outside of places like this, there just aren't enough calls/demands for such things.
I'm guessing a lot more people have heard of cuda than OpenCL due to the marketing, or people would refer to a specific vendor provided/proprietary driver name/series not really knowing what is underneath.

[dragon321]

OpenCL is the only thing for me that needs proprietary driver on my Radeon GPU. Main problem is that AMDGPU-Pro oficially supports only RHEL and Ubuntu so it's not that easy to use it on others distributions. While it's possible to have only OpenCL from proprietary driver and keep rest on Mesa, still additional work on setup is needed.

I wonder if CLVK will be able to replace native OpenCL drivers.

[Creak]

A big part of the problem is OpenCL is largely unknown to the general public imo.
Us tech savy people know what it is, but the average joe/joan will look at you with a blank stare if you mention OpenCL or any of the various other terms: gpgpu, cuda, shaders, etc.
The demand on a distro level or from the average PC user just isn't high enough. Outside of places like this, there just aren't enough calls/demands for such things.
I'm guessing a lot more people have heard of cuda than OpenCL due to the marketing, or people would refer to a specific vendor provided/proprietary driver name/series not really knowing what is underneath.

To be fair, OpenCL is mainly a professional API (e.g. I don't see gamers saying "do you have the latest OpenCL drivers"). And one thing where open source is very strong is when a feature is needed by a profession. When a company really needs it, it will implement it. So the fact that OpenCL doesn't get much traction is not really a problem of bad advertising to the public. The thing is, in the GPGPU world, CUDA is the king (for now).

[coder]

To be fair, OpenCL is mainly a professional API

But that's just chicken-and-egg. If OpenCL were ubiquitous, then more stuff would use it and it's be a subject of broader interest.

I think that's what would be interesting if Mesa's support started to improve. We could conceivably find ourselves in a situation where you could reasonable assume that a modern Linux machine has it, and then suddenly the floodgates could open for apps to start using it.

Okay, it's a little late for that, by now. At this point, I guess it's more likely that happens with Vulkan compute.

[bridgman]

OpenCL is the only thing for me that needs proprietary driver on my Radeon GPU. Main problem is that AMDGPU-Pro oficially supports only RHEL and Ubuntu so it's not that easy to use it on others distributions. While it's possible to have only OpenCL from proprietary driver and keep rest on Mesa, still additional work on setup is needed.

Agreed, we need to make that easier.