Beignet Continues Slowly Tackling OpenCL 2.0 For Intel Linux Graphics

While Intel has already supported OpenCL 2.0 on Windows, under Linux the current Beignet project for open-source OpenCL is still limited to the 1.2 specification. Fortunately, in recent weeks the OpenCL 2.0 branch has seen some new activity.

The Intel OpenCL 2.0 Linux support is still being developed in Beignet via the OCL20 branch. The latest commits were right before Christmas.

Fortunately, bit by bit, the OpenCL 2.0 support is getting closer. With the latest work, Beignet now has SVM support -- one of the big CL 2.0 additions of Shared Virtual Memory so that the host and OpenCL compute devices can share a virtual address range.

The current work enables the coarse-grain buffer SVM support using Userptr and Softpin.

Some other recent Beignet changes include adding the OpenCL 2.0 APIs to the ICD, various fixes, LLVM 3.8 support, and more.

Hopefully it won't be too long into 2016 until there's Intel OpenCL 2.0 support on Linux in release-able form.