LibreOffice's Little-Used OpenCL Support Enjoys Some Code Cleaning

Back in 2013 when AMD was pushing their Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) they joined The Document Foundation and wanted to make use of OpenCL acceleration within this open-source office suite. Shortly thereafter they added many OpenCL functions to LibreOffice but now a decade later it seems to be of little use but at least this week thanks to a Collabora engineer there has been some OpenCL code cleaning for this free software office suite.

AMD's HSA efforts never panned out as envisioned and OpenCL adoption sadly never took off on the Linux desktop. AMD also is no longer on The Document Foundation's Advisory Board. GPU OpenCL usage within LibreOffice has shown potential when dealing with massive Calc spreadsheets in particular but most Linux desktop distributions at least still don't ship with OpenCL support out-of-the-box and for the likes of AMD's open-source driver, since the HSA days they abandoned using the Gallium3D "Clover" OpenCL state tracker and now require the ROCm driver stack for OpenCL. Likewise, the Intel preference these days is also with their Compute-Runtime stack that isn't widely packaged and shipped as another barrier to widespread OpenCL use on the Linux desktop.

The OpenCL code remains within LibreOffice but rarely hear it talked about or see code activity around it. This week though there has been some OpenCL commits to LibreOffice Git. Luboš Luňák of Collabora has been doing a bit of code cleaning to the OpenCL paths.

He's been rewriting some code, removing the OpenCL CONVERT() implementation, dropping "stupid" idea of code for strings in OpenCL, and some optimizing.

LibreOffice rarely sees OpenCL improvements but has been seeing some work this week.

While I would love for OpenCL to finally see broader adoption on the desktop, I'm not holding my breath for a resurgence for OpenCL compute within this open-source office suite.