In trying to understand why OpenCl support is not enabled on my PC, equipped with a Zotac GeForce GTX 1050 card, I examined the user manual (at the 5.2 level) and searched this forum. Both advised me to check the contents of /etc/OpenCL folder on my PC, There is no such folder, so not surprising that there is no GPU acceleration, but I cannot understand why this folder is not present. Any ideas?
btw the proprietary Nvidia driver, version 550.163.01 is installed and I am assuming that this card is supported, even though it is old (another manufacturer’s version of the GTX1050 is installed in my Win 10 PC; darktable 5.4.0 has OpenCL support enabled there).
Which Linux distribution do you use ? For me (Ubuntu 24.04, Nvidia RTX 2060, Driver 580.95.05-0), full OpenCL support comes with the installation of the proprietary driver package.
But this may differ for other distributions. In this case you need to install the opencl driver package separately. Package name depends on the distribution you use.
Edit : AppImage might also be a problem. I have never used the AppImage myself, so I cannot tell you whether the Nvidia driver installed on your system can be used with AppImage at all.
AppImage, unlike Flatpak, does not contain a core sandboxing mechanism. It is simply an executable file container that fuse-mounts and executes the contents of that container when run. So a program launched from an AppImage container is no different from a program installed in your distribution.
For this particular issue I was using MX Linux, Version 25. The issue was/is that there is no immediately apparent advice/instruction in the MX 25 supporting documentation (which is extensive) to separately install openCL drivers - as I was advised above, in this forum. In fact I only found out the name of the necessary driver package by using the AI aspects of a current Google search. Fixing the issue was really quite straightforward after that, but it should not have been necessary for me to have to turn to this forum for help (in which I was implicitly suggesting that there was a problem with darktable- which is demonstrably not the case). MX Linux either needs to install the openCL drivers by default (as, for example, Mint does) or at least explicitly document the requirement to do so, with explicit identification of what optional drivers need to be installed. I will be filing a bug report on the MX forum.
Yes, of course. The two MX Linux packages that I needed to install are named ‘nvidia-opencl-icd’ and ‘nvidia-opencl-common’. These names are applicable to the MX linux distro; the Mint Softfware Manager does not list them.