Rusticl Shows Great Start For Rust OpenCL In Mesa - Might Support SYCL In The Future
![MESA](/assets/categories/mesa.webp)
I've been quite excited for Rusticl and its swift progress over the past several months. Yesterday at the X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC 2022), Karol Herbst talked about this newly-merged Mesa driver. Much of the history will be familiar to Phoronix readers while some of the key takeaways from the talk included:
- Rusticl is much better off than the old "Clover" Gallium3D driver that's been in Mesa for a decade but has few users and poor software compatibility.
- Karol characterized this Rust-learning experience by writing Rusticl as a "very pleasant developing experience" and praises Rust's thread and memory safety design. He calls Rust's threading API a "joy".
- Rusticl is OpenCL conformant for Intel 12th Gen (Xe) graphics on Iris and with the RadeonSI driver for modern AMD GPUs.
- Rusticl supports OpenCL images and is working with OpenCL-accelerated software like The GIMP, Darktable, and others.
- Karol is working on a number of improvements including the reduction of the kernel launch overhead, improving GPU utilization, more optional OpenCL features, and possibly supporting SYCL in the future. Targeting the C++ single-source SYCL standard is interesting especially with Intel embracing SYCL heavily now for cross-vendor GPU acceleration with oneAPI.
Those wanting to learn more about Rusticl in Mesa 22.3 can see Karol's presentation embedded below as well as the associated slide deck.
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