Intel's Beignet Lands LLVM 4.0 Backend Support

While Intel's Beignet is a terrific project especially when it comes to being a leading open-source OpenCL implementation that works with OpenCL 2.0 on GPUs (something that can't be said for Radeon with its open-source OpenCL stack consistently lacking and Nouveau not really being usable either), the sad part of it is that Beignet is consistently slow in supporting new versions of LLVM.

Beignet leverages LLVM for its OpenCL implementation for Intel HD/Iris Graphics hardware. As we've seen with past versions, it's usually not until well after the latest upstream LLVM release that we see support in this Intel open-source project. The latest example is that LLVM 4.0 was released one month ago while finally overnight we see LLVM 4.0 support land in Beignet Git. Now when this LLVM 4.0 support for Beignet ends up in a released version of the OpenCL driver remains another question.

With around 200 lines of code changed, Beignet should now work with LLVM 4.0. Great to see this happening and am excited to try this Intel OpenCL stack with the updated LLVM. At the same time, they've dropped support for LLVM 3.3 and older. Hopefully with LLVM 5.0 later this year we'll see a quicker turnaround time on Beignet support.