Gallium3D's OpenCL "Clover" Begins Seeing New Activity Land For Mesa 19.1

The first real commits to Gallium3D's Clover OpenCL state tracker in several months were landed on Tuesday for Mesa 19.1. These new commits are part of the Red Hat led effort on improving the open-source OpenCL support with a focus on getting the Nouveau open-source NVIDIA driver compute stack up and running.

The commits landing on Tuesday were primarily led by independent Nouveau developer Pierre Moreau who's work has become of interest to Red Hat with the work being done by Karol Herbst and others on bringing up Nouveau OpenCL compute support atop Clover.

The several commits landing on Tuesday into Mesa 19.1-devel aren't worth getting particularly excited about for end-users as there isn't any usability changes to make use of today, but it's stepping in the direction for getting more of the code mainlined. Landing was updating the ICD (Installable Client Driver) table up against the OpenCL 2.2 headers, dropping the TGSI back-end as it's unused, explicitly only working with devices supporting IR_NATIVE, and other changes around the IR support and handling.

For bringing up the open-source compute support there's been the Nouveau OpenCL SPIR-V to NIR work, OpenCL prepping for NIR, and other work. Elsewhere in the Nouveau stack Red Hat developers like Jerome Glisse and Ben Skeggs have been working on the Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) support and coming soon to the mainline kernel is the initial Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) support.

Hopefully for Mesa 19.1~19.2 we'll begin seeing Nouveau OpenCL working with Clover, but a lot of work remains to be merged and the Red Hat developers haven't been entirely clear (or perhaps unsure) about when they hope to have it all merged. But it's great anyhow seeing Clover commits.