Qualcomm Announces Mesa VCL Driver For OpenCL Acceleration Within VMs

Qualcomm engineers have developed VCL as a new open-source OpenCL driver for use with VirtIO-GPU for providing OpenCL hardware acceleration within virtual machines.

VCL is a new Mesa driver for providing OpenCL support within guest VMs that is ultimately accelerated by the host system's driver and underlying GPU hardware. VCL is to OpenCL as Virgl is to OpenGL and Venis is to Vulkan for guest VM graphics acceleration. VCL makes use of the VirtIO-GPU infrastructure.

Rather than using one of the projects to layer OpenCL atop Vulkan or similar, VCL is an OpenCL driver written in Rust for Mesa that communicates with the host via VirtIO for compiling and executing with the host system's OpenCL driver.

Qualcomm engineers announced their work on the VCL driver within the Qualcomm blog.

They have opened a Mesa merge request for adding the VCL VirtIO-GPU OpenCL driver to Mesa. That code is currently undergoing review. For the Virglrenderer code is this merge request for introducing Vcomp as the host-side code needed for supporting this OpenCL usage.