OpenCL support

OpenCL 1.0 has been released with Mac OS X v10.6 “Snow Leopard” (August 28, 2009), so it could be interesting to adopt it.

From the official website:
OpenCL™ is the first open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming of modern processors found in personal computers, servers and handheld/embedded devices. OpenCL (Open Computing Language) greatly improves speed and responsiveness for a wide spectrum of applications in numerous market categories from gaming and entertainment to scientific and medical software.

OpenCL supports a wide range of applications, from embedded and consumer software to HPC solutions, through a low-level, high-performance, portable abstraction. By creating an efficient, close-to-the-metal programming interface, OpenCL will form the foundation layer of a parallel computing ecosystem of platform-independent tools, middleware and applications.

OpenCL is being created by the Khronos Group with the participation of many industry-leading companies and institutions including 3DLABS, Activision Blizzard, AMD, Apple, ARM, Broadcom, Codeplay, Electronic Arts, Ericsson, Freescale, Fujitsu, GE, Graphic Remedy, HI, IBM, Intel, Imagination Technologies, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Motorola, Movidia, Nokia, NVIDIA, Petapath, QNX, Qualcomm, RapidMind, Samsung, Seaweed, S3, ST Microelectronics, Takumi, Texas Instruments, Toshiba and Vivante.

Gallium3D/Mesa7.5+ is already being ported there has be quite a bit of progress although as of the R1alpha release it doesn’t have hardware 3D acceleration

I see there was recently code added to svn to test out loading the accelerated 3D drivers so eventual support is quite likely

Also Gallium3D is designed to simplify supporting multiple GPU toolkits such as OpenGL OpenVG OpenCL and OpenGL ES among others

This support is being added incrementally over time by a few developers so please be patient since they seem to be doing a great job already

Video acceleration is much more important than 3d acceleration, because hardly anyone will be using 3d graphics on Haiku, but everyone are going to watch videos. I’m prepared to donate a (to me) large amount of money to get gpu accelerated video for Haiku.

http://www.haiku-os.org/community/donating_to_haiku

Thank you!

Video acceleration? Just video isn’t that demanding… I can watch HD video with Haiku using the ancient VLC 0.8.x series without any major issues. I don’t know how to check whether it’s accelerated or not, but I would guess that it isn’t. Don’t get me wrong though, acceleration is still a nice addition, and the donation is very much appreciated!

cb88: Will Haiku use Gallium3D? Natively, or through X11? If a native port is being made, then it’s probably better to focus on Gallium3D than supporting OpenCL directly IMO.

1080p AVC videos can be very demanding. If the gpu could do the decoding (or part of it) then it would be possible to watch HD videos (blu-ray) on netbooks that have a slow CPU too.