Beignet Is Working On OpenCL 2.0 Open-Source Linux Support

While writing this morning about Intel Cherryview support being added to Beignet, I also noticed Intel developers have been quietly fleshing out OpenCL 2.0 support for Linux.

Within Intel's Beignet project for open-source OpenCL support on Linux systems with HD/Iris Graphics, there's a OpenCL20 branch as part of Beignet Git. The OpenCL 2.0 support code hasn't been touched in a few weeks, but it's clearly in the works by the Intel China crew that's been maintaining this project.

Based upon that branch, it appears that this OpenCL 2.0 branch is forming what will be the eventual release of Beignet 1.1. Version 2.0 of the Open Computing Language was formally released in late 2013 and brought support for C11 atomics, pipes, images, a generic address space, nested parallelism, and shared virtual memory support. For now, OpenCL 1.2 support is provided to modern Intel hardware by Beignet 1.0.x.

While a lot of code was pushed to the OpenCL 2.0 branch in March, it doesn't appear that the support is yet complete / the Beignet 1.1 release will be here in the very near future. Nevertheless, it's great that Intel is continuing to invest in open-source OpenCL support with multiple developers working on Beignet while the overall open-source/Linux OpenCL scene remains in relatively sad shape.

Once the OpenCL 2.0 support is there, Beignet developers will then have the difficult but interesting mission of tackling OpenCL 2.1 and SPIR-V support.