Freedreno Is Looking Forward To Mesa SPIR-V/OpenCL Too

There has been some interesting open-source GPU compute happenings in the works this year including SPIR-V support for Gallium3D Clover and Nouveau NIR support along with associated Mesa changes. Rob Clark of Red Hat and lead developer on the Freedreno driver has also jumped on board these recent Mesa compute initiatives.

Rob Clark posted some patches this weekend pertaining to the recent Mesa OpenCL compute efforts. Curious if he had plans for OpenCL with the Freedreno driver, the reverse-engineered open-source driver stack for Qualcomm Adreno hardware, I fired off an email for more details.

He's been working on the broad effort for these compute initiatives and helping Karol and Pierre on their compute plans for Nouveau. He mentioned the plan is to use the same clc to SPIR-V to NIR path for both Freedreno and Nouveau drivers, which could also be utilized by other Gallium3D drivers too.

There is likely to be Adreno A5xx hardware support for this compute code but there will likely be OpenCL on Adreno A300 series hardware too as there are interested in users. Most of the OpenCL Clover work is about SPIR-V and NIR that benefit all drivers with little work needed to the individual hardware drivers. Rob shared that most of the work is about adding some new intrinsics and kernel parameters while most of the compute pipeline is shared code.