Rusticl Had A Great Year For Rust OpenCL In Mesa With 3.1 Support, More Drivers

Rusticl lead developer Karol herbst provided a status update on this Mesa Rust-based OpenCL driver during the XDC 2026 conference happening in Toronto.

Daily Phoronix readers know most of the happenings already for Rusticl in recent times, but for those not following this open-source OpenCL driver development too closely, it's made a lot of progress over the course of the year.

When it comes to new hardware driver support with Rusticl, the Arm Mali Panfrost driver passed OpenCL conformance and now enables Rusticl by default. The Freedreno driver for Qualcomm Adreno hardware also enables Rusticl support by default.

On the feature front, Rusticl has OpenCL 3.1 support as well as supporting a variety of newer OpenCL extensions like cl_ext_float_atomics and various cl_khr_subgroup* extensions. Rusticl even provides conformant OpenCL 3.1 on Apple M1/M2 with Asahi Linux.

There have also been improvements done for better performance of Rusticl via queue profiling on the GPU, better workgroup size selection, and more.

Karol has also been hacking on NOCL for Rusticl atop the official NVIDIA Linux driver stack. Earthqaic support is also in the works for a Qualcomm QAIC accelerator Gallium3D driver.

Those wishing to learn more about Rusticl in 2026 can watch Karol's XDC presentation embedded above.