Rusticl as a modern OpenCL implementation for Mesa Gallium3D drivers has turned out remarkably well. Rusticl performance has evolved quite well for this Rust-based OpenCL driver and it continues tacking on new features / OpenCL extensions as well as working gracefully with more Mesa drivers. Rusticl lead developer Karol Herbst presented on some of the recent accomplishments for this driver back at XDC2025.
At the X.Org Developers Conference in Vienna, Karol Herbst of Red Hat presented on some of the milestones achieved this year for this driver that has worked out much better than the former Mesa “Clover” OpenCL driver. A lot has happened in the past number of months for Rusticl from Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) finally getting into place, SPIR-V 1.6 features, async and parallel program compilation, and supporting a wide variety of additional OpenCL extensions.
Rusticl has also matured enough to be enabled by default with some additional drivers such as Asahi, Freedreno, and RadeonSI. The generic Zink driver will also see Rusticl by default too.
Some of the work items that Karol Herbst noted are a work-in-progress include more OpenCL subgroup extensions, cl_khr_external_memory support, establishing an LLVM SPIR-V target, and program scope global variables.
Those wishing to learn more about Rusticl in 2025 can see the XDC2025 presentation embedded above along with the PDF slides.
