Zink Lands Kernel Shader Support For Getting Rusticl OpenCL Running

Earlier this month one of the interesting milestones for Mesa's Rust-based OpenCL "Rusticl" implementation was getting Rusticl running on Zink so that this OpenCL implementation was running atop this Gallium3D driver in turn running atop a bare metal Vulkan driver. As of yesterday some of that necessary code was merged to Mesa 22.3.

Mesa 22.3 is shaping up to be a big feature release for this set of open-source GPU drivers and will ship as stable before Christmas. One of the big areas for Mesa 22.3 is the Rusticl implementation providing modern OpenCL 3.0 support to Gallium3D drivers, complete with OpenCL images support. Rusticl is much better off than the existing "Clover" OpenCL Gallium3D driver that hasn't seen much activity in years.

Besides Rusticl working with an increasing number of Gallium3D drivers like RadeonSI and Intel ANV, Rusticl atop Zink opens it up for running on the Vulkan drivers -- and with good performance too. For the Rusticl-on-Zink support talked about since earlier this month, some of that necessary support has now been merged.

Lead Zink developer Mike Blumenkrantz sent in KERNEL shader support for Zink. This KERNEL-type shader support for Zink is a requirement for getting Rusticl working.

Karol Herbst got Rusticl running on Zink, which basically means another way of getting OpenCL implemented atop Vulkan.

Lead Rusticl developer Karol Herbst of Red Hat commented in that MR, "I still have a few things to mainline, but nothing big and I don't really find the time to clean them up until tomorrow anyway. With this images are basically working and I can start doing proper enablement in rusticl."

There still is a few more days to go until the expected Mesa 22.3 branching / feature freeze, so we'll see what other open-source Linux GPU driver enhancements manage to land for this quarterly feature release. Mesa 22.3.0 should in turn be out around the end of November or early December if all goes well.