Another feature to look forward to with this quarter's [1]Mesa 24.3 release is the open-source Freedreno Gallium3D driver for Qualcomm Adreno hardware now supporting Rusticl-based OpenCL compute.

After two months of review and months of development work prior to that, the OpenCL support via Rusticl for Freedreno has been merged in time for Mesa 24.3. This required several changes/additions to Freedreno for getting this Rust-written OpenCL compute driver working out. This open-source OpenCL support has been successfully tested on Adreno 600 series hardware and newer.

Among other Snapdragon devices, Heidelberg tested on a OnePlus 6 smartphone running Linux with the Snapdragon 845 featuring an Adreno 630 GPU. With the OnePlus 6 he [2]found an Tinygrad on the CPU taking 1210 ms for a GPT-2 sample model but 390ms with Rusticl or as low as 113ms with an additional option.

See [3]this merge request that was merged to Mesa Git on Sunday for providing this Rusticl open-source OpenCL support for modern Qualcomm Adreno devices on Linux.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Mesa+24.3

[2] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/25840#note_2196699

[3] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/30835