an opencl binding - zcl/panama

[Michael Zucchi]

Hi guys,

I've been waiting on work to organise themselves this year so i've had 
plenty more free time and it's been too cold to drink beer, alas.  
Rather than poke the emailing list I've been busy porting zcl over to 
use jdk.incubator.foreign.

I wrote a fairly detailed overview of the issues and problems at the 
link below.  It also has some details on obtaining the source. The 
source is modular and builds on gnu/linux/amd64 using gnu make and 
perl.I could provide a pre-generated netbeans 11 compatible source-tree 
if asked and it will already open in netbeans after you get 'make gen' 
to run.

   https://www.zedzone.space/software/panama.html

In summary: I solved every problem and mostly present the same api but a 
lot of it wasn't particularly fun to solve or write.  I use low level 
stuff directly with no Pointer or similar abstractions and have a 
thread-specific stack allocator thing for argument construction.

This is very much work in progress, a lot is missing (although mostly 
clEnqueue* variants) and what isn't hadn't been tested.  I have an old 
gpu and the only driver i have is Mesa OpenCL 1.1, and even then that 
has no support for images so i'm severely restricted in what i can even 
check (i do have access to other machines*).  I don't really have any 
demo code but now I have a base working I can make some up ... if i can 
think of anything. I didn't include the source but i have successfully 
compiled a kernel, invoked it, had an event invoke a callback, and 
accessed results, and had things collected properly.  Although that was 
before i re-arranged it from a testbed to branch on zcl so i might've 
broken everything in the move.

For this project perhaps some benchmarks of the api would make more 
sense than anything.  It uses the lowest level api's almost directly so 
it might be a good candidate for comparison to others that use 
abstractions. I didn't choose this route for performance, it was just 
easier to write and is infact the second attempt after throwing away a 
whole pile of abstraction code that just got in the way.

Cheers,
  Z

* stairs in the way, broken hip, on crutches for last 3 months, nearly 
@#$@# over