Mesa Is Working Towards Headless Compute/OpenCL Support

Written by Michael Larabel in Mesa on 7 July 2015 at 01:43 PM EDT. 6 Comments
MESA
Mesa release manager Emil Velikov published a set of patches recently in what he's working on for render-node-only OpenCL and other code clean-ups.

The focus of these changes still being reviewed is to allow for headless OpenCL systems, such as common for compute/GPGPU farms. Right now to gain access to the OpenCL/compute support with the open-source Mesa/Gallium3D drivers, the X.Org Server and XCB are required. This patch series attempts to clear that up to work towards having OpenCL headless compute.


The patch series can be found here. It will be nice dropping the X requirement for compute on Mesa drivers, but I don't think anyone will be running OpenCL compute farms with the open-source drivers in the near future... Open-source OpenCL support still sucks for putting it bluntly. While Intel has made much progress with Beignet, there's still much to be desired from it and the "Clover" Gallium3D state tracker -- not to mention for AMD/Nouveau for catching up to the performance offered by the proprietary graphics drivers.
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