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Intel Releases New OpenCL Implementation for GNU/Linux

An anonymous reader writes "Intel has released its first version of Beignet, an open-source OpenCL run-time and LLVM back-end for Linux that uses LLVM/Clang and is compatible with Ivy Bridge processors. Right now there's partial support for OpenCL 1.0 and 1.1 along with other basic functionality." This is not using Gallium 3D, and at least David Arlie thinks it should not be an fd.o project because it duplicates functionality already present in Mesa.

2 of 60 comments (clear)

  1. Re:OpenCL is a heterogeneous processing language by Plombo · · Score: 5, Informative

    This has nothing to do with Gallium 3D or Mesa which are 3D graphics related. The only similarity is that some of the targets happens to be GPU. The person has no clue what the hell he was talking about. May be he is confused it with OpenGL!?

    This is AMD's answer to CUDA.

    No, you're quite wrong and he's entirely right. This has everything to do with Gallium and Mesa. Despite it sometimes being called "Gallium3D", Gallium is not just for graphics. It also supports GPU compute, specifically OpenCL, through the Clover state tracker.

    You must not recognize the name of Dave Airlie - among other things, he's an active Mesa developer, one of the main X.Org developers, and the maintainer of the Direct Rendering Manager in the Linux kernel; i.e., he is the person who submits the pull requests to Linus for the graphics drivers in the kernel. Not exactly the kind of person who would get confused over the difference between OpenGL and OpenCL, or who has "no clue" what he's talking about.

  2. Re:OpenCL is a heterogeneous processing language by Plombo · · Score: 5, Informative

    Got a reference for us that isn't out of date, and which explains how Clover is independent of Mesa and Gallium3D?

    I never said it was independent of Gallium - it's not. Gallium, however, is a general-purpose API for GPU libraries that is independent of OS or any particular GPU hardware, and has LLVMpipe as a working and fast software backend for machines without a GPU.

    As for being independent of Mesa, Clover has never been dependent on Mesa. It just lives within the Mesa repository, because almost all GPU-related code in userspace lives in the Mesa repository. Clover and all other Gallium state trackers (with the obvious exception of the Mesa state tracker) have no dependency on core Mesa or OpenGL, and never have.

    I follow Mesa and Gallium development closely and have made (and am currently making) some non-trivial contributions, so I would consider myself a fairly credible primary source here. Certainly more credible than the Wikipedia page which makes LLVMpipe look like it's still in an experimental stage (it's been stable for years now) and has a list of arbitrary "milestones" that hasn't been updated in the last year and a half.