More Criticism Comes Towards Intel's Beignet OpenCL

Yesterday was marked by the first release of Beignet, an open-source Linux OpenCL solution for Intel Ivy Bridge hardware, however it has drawn criticism by open-source developers.

In the Intel Beignet 0.1 release announcement, I pointed out Red Hat's David Airlie called out the hardware company on duplicating code, dissatisfied they didn't simply write a compute driver for Gallium3D so they could leverage the Clover state tracker for OpenCL and other FreeDesktop.org projects, and other criticism. Since then, there's been more negative comments about the Beignet approach of duplicating code and in some manners reinventing the wheel rather than leveraging Gallium3D/Clover.

AMD's Tom Stellard has now written a lengthy email about his views on Intel's OpenCL approach. Stellard reaffirms that Beignet is replicating other existing open-source projects like the Gallium3D "Clover" state tracker, POCL (Portable OpenCL), libclc OpenCL library, and the Piglit OpenCL test suite. Stellard also points out in detail some traits of Gallium3D OpenCL to clear up any misconceptions about the 3D and compute handling, LLVM IR usage, and state trackers.

Tom Stellard believes it would be easy for Intel to merge this code into a compute-only Gallium3D driver and that Clover and POCL would be of use to them rather than maintaining this separate code tree.

More comments on the Intel Beignet release can be seen within this growing forum thread.