darktable and OpenCL on Mac Retina running bare metal Linux

Thanks- I guess we can put that to bed! I’ll do a bit of testing on the MacOS install and see if the OpenCL crashes on the new version 3.2.1 have gone away. The laptop is what I use when traveling, and there isn’t any of that happening these days.

As an aside, I started looking at Linux notebooks, and they are very expensive here in the US. Time to start saving up me thinks.

Thanks again for your time and help.

You can get almost any decent notebook with Windows and convert it to Linux, easily. I run Fedora 32 on an HP Probook 450 G3 (several years old, now) that I bought new for less than $1000.

I think next time around for a laptop I may try that route. I try tp keep up with the Reddit Linux hardware thread, but the hardware changes so rapidly it’s hard to know what will fully work and what won’t. In the meantime, the Macbook Pro I bought last year used is really solid except for the openCL issue, which doesn’t affect me much. Running the VM on it has been pretty good except for the recent MacOS update that broke Vbox. Hopefully it will be fixed in October.

I have used DT on MacBook pros with Iris graphics and on Linux laptops with mobile Nvidia.
On MBPs with MacOS openCL works but the performance gain is marginal. With mobile Nvidia it’s like night and day, worth the extra cost.

FWIW on desktop, I used AMD bus powered cards (rx560) with the open-source rocm driver for a few of years but had lots of small issues and AMD was very slow to fix anything and they wouldn’t support popular distributions (just them and Ubuntu LTS). Eventually I gave up on supporting AMD and changed to Nvidia 1650, also bus powered (it’s a silent workstation with no fans and a small power supply) and it was night and day, I measured double the performance vs rx560. And all the small issues were gone. Nvidia open source policy and attitude stinks but at least the proprietary SW works really well, all distros support it and the hardware is superb.

Is the mobile Nvidia card a replacement for the onboard Intel Iris card? I could’nt find much info on the web, other than some chatter about power issues. I haven’t tested the new version 3.0.1 on the MacOs yet to see if the stability issues have been solved. I did notice that the performance without OpenCL on the Linux Vbox system was not much different without OpenCL.

I’ve been running my desktop which is an HPEnvy from Costco for 6 months now with it’s Radeon RX550 card with no problems. It took a bit of searching to get the right drivers in, and these instructions worked for me:
https://haefelfinger.ch/posts/2019/2019-01-02-Darktable-Radeon-OpenCL/

Thanks for your info.

Nvidia mobile is discrete graphics but I don’t think it’s a card that you can add ir upgrade

In the Mac I have been using DT 3.2, the latest. I’ve done some casual editing so far and had no issues. It’s a vast improvement compared to 3.0

Good to hear! I look forward to spending a bit of time with it on the Mac. Waiting for a rainy day!