Intel's Jason Ekstrand has landed a set of patches for handling of kernels within Iris, Intel's modern Gallium3D driver. He commented , " This MR contains most of the patches required to handle kernels in iris. I've had them lying around in a branch in some form or another for a while. We should upstream what we can. "
In particular this is about handling the MESA_SHADER_KERNEL type. This is what was added to Mesa back in early 2019 by Karol Herbst of Red Hat as part of their OpenCL work on Nouveau. MESA_SHADER_KERNEL is for representing OpenCL kernels.
As part of this kernel bring-up is also related work like handling of 64-bit intrinsics, support for serialized NIR, and supporting the on-disk shader cache with these kernels. The actual bring-up isn't too much given that OpenGL compute shaders are already supported and all of the common work in place with the NIR compiler back-end.
Interesting work although for those focused on GPU computing the Intel Compute Runtime stack already provides open-source OpenCL 2.1 support (and OpenCL 3.0 already for Gen12, will be enabled for existing hardware when CL 3.0 is ratified) along with Intel oneAPI Level Zero support.