LibreOffice's Little-Used OpenCL Support Enjoys Some Code Cleaning

[phoronix]

Phoronix: LibreOffice's Little-Used OpenCL Support Enjoys Some Code Cleaning

Back in 2013 when AMD was pushing their Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) they joined The Document Foundation and wanted to make use of OpenCL acceleration within this open-source office suite. Shortly thereafter they added many OpenCL functions to LibreOffice but now a decade later it seems to be of little use but at least this week thanks to a Collabora engineer there has been some OpenCL code cleaning for this free software office suite...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/LibreOffice-OpenCL-Code-2022

[gnarlin]

But WHY isn't OpenCL packaged and enabled in common GNU+Linux distributions by default? Aren't the Radeon and Intel implementations Free software? What's the holdup?

[uid313]

But where is Vulkan Compute, oneAPI, GTK 4 and Qt 6 support?

[schmidtbag]

I've always wanted to use OpenCL with LO but no matter what GPU I used, I couldn't enable it, so I just stopped trying.

[Linuxxx]

But WHY isn't OpenCL packaged and enabled in common GNU+Linux distributions by default? Aren't the Radeon and Intel implementations Free software? What's the holdup?

Ask both AMD & Intel why they are writing such convoluted OpenCL drivers, whereas nVidia users get that support with a single-click by simply installing their binary driver.

[zexelon]

Ask both AMD & Intel why they are writing such convoluted OpenCL drivers, whereas nVidia users get that support with a single-click by simply installing their binary driver.

Probably the biggest question by far!

[M@GOid]

I've always wanted to use OpenCL with LO but no matter what GPU I used, I couldn't enable it, so I just stopped trying.

I believe I saw it working only once, many years ago on Windows, if my memory is correct. As times goes by, newer versions of drivers and LO made the thing broke again.

[Vistaus]

Ask both AMD & Intel why they are writing such convoluted OpenCL drivers, whereas nVidia users get that support with a single-click by simply installing their binary driver.

So there's actually one thing Nvidia does better with their driver?

[NeoMorpheus]

Ask both AMD & Intel why they are writing such convoluted OpenCL drivers, whereas nVidia users get that support with a single-click by simply installing their binary driver.

‘Speaking from my behind, so i might be absolutely wrong, but i am willing to bet thats because they are trying to adhere to the FOSS way of doing things, instead of pushing proprietary code.

[Guest]

‘Speaking from my behind, so i might be absolutely wrong, but i am willing to bet thats because they are trying to adhere to the FOSS way of doing things, instead of pushing proprietary code.

If that were the case with AMD, they would make Clover usable. Instead, it's stuck on headless OpenCL 1 support, while AMD works on ROCm which is more confusing to deploy than fglrx was.

So there's actually one thing Nvidia does better with their driver?

Toggling the color space between RGB Full, Limited, and YCbCr is a nightmare on AMD; can do this easily with the radeon R600 driver with a xrandr prop, but that never carried over to AMDGPU. On top of that, AMD defaults incorrectly to YCbCr on HDMI, so if I use an AMD GPU with any of my displays, I either deal with the mismatched color space, or prepare for an adventure on dumping EDID, patching it to remove YCbCr, and getting that EDID to load through dracut and initrd or whatever the distro I'm using decides to use.

Meanwhile on NVIDIA, I go to their control panel (which they actually have on Linux ), and toggle the setting no problem, consistently with any display and distro. Not that I have to though, because it defaults to full RGB. NVIDIA also has dithering control.