NOCL Making Progress As Mesa Gallium/OpenCL Atop NVIDIA CUDA

In development the past year has been the Mesa Gallium3D API implemented atop NVIDIA's CUDA driver API. Initially named "CLUDA" and now going by "NOCL", this Mesa code paired with Rusticl is working well for OpenCL atop the NVIDIA proprietary driver as a new compute option.

Karol Herbst presented on the latest NOCL developments at the XDC 2026 conference ongoing in Toronto. The NOCL merge request is still pending and provides a compute-only Gallium driver for use with the NVIDIA proprietary driver. This Rusticl-focused driver uses the NVIDIA CUDA driver and leverages the NVIDIA PTX representation.

NOCL provides an open-source OpenCL option for the official NVIDIA Linux driver, supports more OpenCL extensions than the NVIDIA OpenCL proprietary driver, and can be useful for performance comparisons as well as a development exercise around the NVIDIA PTX IR. PTX-to-NIR support in turn will be important for the likes of DLSS with the NVK Mesa driver.

Those wanting to learn more about NOCL can watch Karol's XDC 2026 presentation embedded below.

The NOCL pull request for Mesa remains open via this ticket.