The developers of the Mesa project announced the certification of the rusticl driver by the Khronos organization, which successfully passed all the tests from the CTS (Kronos Conformance Test Suite) and was recognized as fully compatible with the OpenCL 3.0 specification, which defines the API and extensions of the C language for organizing cross-platform parallel computing. Obtaining a certificate makes it possible to officially declare compatibility with standards and use Khronos trademarks associated with them. The test was performed on a system with 12 generation integrated Intel GPUs using the Gallium3D Iris driver.
The driver is written in Rust and developed by Karol Herbst of Red Hat, who is involved in the development of Mesa, the Nouveau driver, and the OpenCL open stack. Rusticl acts as a counterpart to Mesa's OpenCL Clover frontend and is also developed using Mesa's Gallium interface. Clover has long been in a derelict state and rusticl is positioned as its future replacement. In addition to achieving compatibility with OpenCL 3.0, the Rusticl project differs from Clover in supporting OpenCL extensions for image processing, but does not yet support the FP16 format. Rusticl uses rust-bindgen to generate bindings for Mesa and OpenCL that allow Rust functions to be called from C code and vice versa.
The code to support the Rust language and the rusticl driver have been accepted into the Mesa mainstream and will be offered in the Mesa 22.3 release, which is expected in late November. Rust and rusticl support will be disabled by default and will require building with explicit options "-D gallium-rusticl=true -Dllvm=enabled -Drust_std=2021". When building, the rustc compiler, bindgen, LLVM, SPIRV-Tools, and the SPIRV-LLVM-Translator are required as additional dependencies.
The possibility of using the Rust language in the Mesa project has been discussed since 2020. Among the advantages of supporting Rust are increased security and driver quality due to the elimination of common memory issues, as well as the ability to incorporate third-party developments into Mesa, such as Kazan (a Rust implementation of Vulkan). Disadvantages include increased build system complexity, a reluctance to tie into the cargo packaging system, expanded build environment requirements, and the need to include the Rust compiler in the build dependencies required for building key desktop components. Linux.
Additionally, the Nouveau driver development work, also led by Carol Herbst, is noteworthy. The Nouveau driver adds basic OpenGL support for NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30xx GPUs based on the Ampere microarchitecture, released since May 2020. Changes related to support for the new chips will be incorporated into the kernel. Linux 6.2 and Mesa 22.3.
Source: opennet.ru
