Rusticl OpenCL Still Striving For Better Performance, SYCL & HIP Features

Karol Herbst at Red Hat who leads development on Mesa's Rust-written OpenCL "Rusticl" driver presented to share the progress made over the course of the year on this modern alternative to Gallium3D's Clover as well as some of the work still being pursued by this open-source OpenCL implementation for Gallium3D drivers.

Herbst shared how the RadeonSI support has been coming together to complement the existing Intel iris and NVIDIA Nouveau support, work-in-progress support for the Raspberry Pi V3D driver, and also how Rusticl now supports Zink for running this OpenCL code atop Vulkan drivers.

This year has also seen many more OpenCL extensions implemented, LLVMpipe support for function calls, and more. Among the items still being worked on are around OpenCL-OpenGL sharing, Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) support, semaphores, formal OpenCL conformance for Zink and RadeonSI, support for buffers larger than 2GB, performance optimizations, and implementing features needed by SYCL and HIP.

More details on the Rusticl state can be found via Karol's XDC 2023 slide deck and the presentation embedded below.