Ubuntu 14.10 Will Not Ship With Open-Source OpenCL Support

While Fedora 21 is planning for open-source OpenCL support "out of the box", the same can't be said for Ubuntu 14.10. Ubuntu developers aren't looking for any stock OpenCL support be made available in the next distribution release.

While more OpenCL software is offering code-paths for OpenCL support from LibreOffice to The GIMP for faster processing by leveraging GPUs, there apparently isn't a compelling enough reason for Canonical to support OpenCL out-of-the-box on Ubuntu Linux quite yet. The open-source driver support for OpenCL continues to improve with Intel's Beignet and the OpenCL Gallium3D state tracker for the Radeon/Nouveau drivers, which can now run Bit Coin miners, etc.

In response to a packaging bug report on Launchpad for enabling OpenCL in Ubuntu's Mesa package -- seeing as the OpenCL Mesa support is even enabled in Debian -- Maarten Lankhorst of Canonical wrote, "I don't think there's a point to opencl at the moment, as soon as something in the archive really needs it feel free to reopen it."

At least for those that opt to install the proprietary AMD Catalyst and NVIDIA graphics drivers on Ubuntu, OpenCL support is available, but it looks like open-source graphics driver users will need to keep waiting... Just like Ubuntu not enabling Gallium3D VDPAU support.