OpenCL - A small glance at where we stand and what we achieved. (And ocl-icd)

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More than a year ago it was a change. A change in Fedora 22: The introduction of OpenCL. The idea was to get OpenCL somewhat usable out of the boxin Fedora, to enable people to use it, to further get more people testing it, to finally find more bugs and raise the demand. With a lot of help from others, especially Björn, the change made it into Fedora 21.

About a year later a couple of bugs were found, and some OpenCL related packages got co-maintainers and more or less regular updates.

One bug tho in ocl-icd (an OpenCL ICD loader) gained some attention lately, because the usage of ocl-icd lead to an infite loop.

After some discussion on the bug, two of us reached out to upstream. Within ours we got a feedback, and even more, the bug got (likely) fixed. That is nice, and that is the power of open source. The power of sharing, caring, and working together. This is especially remarkable, because the ocl-icd maintainers are not active in the Fedora community, but were so responsive and had open ears to fix the bug. This is not always the case, but nice that it worked so nicely here.

Let’s get to something else after this outburst: OpenCL is used much more in Fedora compared to how much it was used a year ago. While trying to identify the packages which might need a rebuild because of this ocl-icd change, I saw that we’ve got quite some packages which now require ocl-icd (the only ICD loader in Fedora for now).

$ repoquery --whatrequires ocl-icd --qf "%{name}" | sort -u
clinfo
clpeak
erlang-cl
gocl
LuxRender
LuxRender-core
LuxRender-lib
mesa-libOpenCL
ocl-icd-devel
pocl
wine-opencl

Nice to see that the interest is higher than before. But we also see that OpenCL still needs much love to make it really usable. But work is done everywhere, especially the implementations progress slowly, but steady.

::: {#footer} [ May 18th, 2015 11:27pm ]{#timestamp} [opencl]{.tag} [fedora]{.tag} [ocl-icd]{.tag} :::