Intel Is Looking For Feedback On Their Open-Source OpenCL Linux Driver Support

In addition to investing in their new "Iris" Gallium3D OpenGL driver and continuing to mature their "ANV" Vulkan driver, they do continue bolstering their OpenCL "NEO" open-source Linux driver that doesn't receive as much attention by the community but is beginning to appear within Linux distribution repositories as the successor to their earlier "Beignet" OpenCL driver.

Intel open-sourced their OpenCL "NEO" driver at the start of 2018 and it's made rapid progress on OpenCL 2.x support, maturing their LLVM compiler back-end, and all-around being a fairly well-rounded driver that is now arguably more mature than the former Beignet driver.

The OpenCL NEO stack will only become more important as the Xe Graphics come to light as well as Intel's efforts around "oneAPI" and related their SYCL support with using their OpenCL driver for executing that single-source C++ code on their GPUs.

But as it stands today, the OpenCL NEO driver already offers OpenCL 2.x support for existing Intel HD/Iris Graphics hardware and is fully open-source. Gregory Stoner, one of the recent ex-AMD employees to join Intel under Raja's leadership and who previously worked on HSA/ROCm, is seeking feedback from Linux users on the current OpenCL driver support.

Love to hear your experience with Intel OpenCl Linux drivers

— Gregory Stoner (@angstroms) April 26, 2019

Via Twitter he's looking for user experiences with using their OpenCL Linux drivers.

What is your favorite OpenCl application to run on the Neo based Linux stack

— Gregory Stoner (@angstroms) April 26, 2019

As well, what OpenCL applications Linux users are using / interested in.

Hopefully this feedback will lead to more improvements to the NEO driver stack. If you aren't on Twitter, you can always share your driver experiences by commenting on this article in the forums and surely some Intel folks will see the data.

If you haven't tried the "new" OpenCL Linux driver, it is now in the Disco archive for Ubuntu 19.04 as intel-opencl-icd and is also available on Arch Linux, Clear Linux, and Ubuntu 18.04 at least -- for those not wanting to build from source yourself. Details on those packages here.