OpenCL 1.2 Support Merged For Mesa's Gallium3D Clover While OpenCL 3.0 Is Being Tackled

With this quarter's Mesa 20.3 the Gallium3D "Clover" state tracker providing OpenCL support finally can handle version 1.2!

Clover has been at OpenCL 1.1 support for years but with not much activity until Red Hat's relatively recent work on Nouveau compute as well as Microsoft's interest in using Mesa for mapping OpenCL and OpenGL over Direct3D for WSL2 and other use-cases. Thanks to the renewed interest in Clover, OpenCL 1.2 support is finally merged.

As of yesterday the CL 1.2 bits were merged for Mesa 20.3 due out around the start of December.

Now hitting OpenCL 1.2, there is a path for hitting the recently ratified OpenCL 3.0 and in fact not too involved given all of the OpenCL 2.x functionality is made optional.

Being worked on is clover-cl3-wip where that early code for OpenCL 3.0 support for Clover is building up.

Once all the recent Clover work settles down it will be interesting to see how well this Gallium3D state tracker is working and performing these days for OpenCL compute.