request: Please revive beignet!

[Tetsuji Rai]

Hi all,

I've been using Fedora for a long time, but I was at lost to see there's
no beignet supported in Fedora 30.  But fortunately, archlinux had
source patches for glibc-2.29, llvm,clang 8 and it worked on Fedora
30.   However now on Fedora 31, archlinux's patch any longer works, and
I am obliged to use binary packages of beignet borrowed from Fedora 29. 
But it's old and won't held in Fedora mirrors in the near future.

I guess there are many users still using Ivybridge or Haswell and
needing beignet.  Will developers support beignet?

Thanks in advance!!

-Tetsuji

[Sérgio Basto]

On Fri, 2019-11-01 at 08:06 +0900, Tetsuji Rai wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I've been using Fedora for a long time, but I was at lost to see
> there's
> no beignet supported in Fedora 30.  But fortunately, archlinux had
> source patches for glibc-2.29, llvm,clang 8 and it worked on Fedora
> 30.   However now on Fedora 31, archlinux's patch any longer works,
> and
> I am obliged to use binary packages of beignet borrowed from Fedora
> 29. 
> But it's old and won't held in Fedora mirrors in the near future.
>
> I guess there are many users still using Ivybridge or Haswell and
> needing beignet.  Will developers support beignet?

Commit [1] says "Starting in Q1’2018, Beignet has been deprecated in
favor of NEO OpenCL driver"

[1] 
https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/beignet/c/74628d735c9a4e6c8ac5c888adbfca0...
> Thanks in advance!!
>
> -Tetsuji
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[Adam Jackson]

On Fri, 2019-11-01 at 00:18 +0000, Sérgio Basto wrote:
> On Fri, 2019-11-01 at 08:06 +0900, Tetsuji Rai wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I've been using Fedora for a long time, but I was at lost to see there's
> > no beignet supported in Fedora 30.  But fortunately, archlinux had
> > source patches for glibc-2.29, llvm,clang 8 and it worked on Fedora
> > 30.   However now on Fedora 31, archlinux's patch any longer works, and
> > I am obliged to use binary packages of beignet borrowed from Fedora 29. 
> > But it's old and won't held in Fedora mirrors in the near future.

This is not strictly true. koji retains the builds for things that
shipped in "gold" releases forever, so this should stick around:

https://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org/packages/beignet/1.3.2/5.fc29/

But I agree, that's not ideal.
> > I guess there are many users still using Ivybridge or Haswell and
> > needing beignet.  Will developers support beignet?
>
> Commit [1] says "Starting in Q1’2018, Beignet has been deprecated in
> favor of NEO OpenCL driver"
>
> [1] https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/beignet/c/74628d735c9a4e6c8ac5c888adbfca0...

Unfortunately NEO doesn't support Ivybridge or Haswell, so that's not
much help. Likewise there's a new "iris" gallium driver in Mesa that I
think in principle could be built/loaded as an OpenCL driver, but it
too only supports Broadwell and newer.

We don't have the resources to keep beignet building with newer and
newer llvm, let alone working. If the broader community wanted to pick
up that project and run with it, that'd be awesome, but it's not
something we're likely to maintain on our own. (My personal preference
for solving this problem would be another gallium driver for gen4
through gen7, but that is admittedly also a lot of work.)

- ajax