With today’s Mesa 25.1-devel Git code, the “Clover” OpenCL Gallium3D state tracker is officially deprecated. Clover will be eventually removed with the Rust-written Rusticl OpenCL driver being modern, much more actively maintained, and all-around a better option than the aging Clover code.
Clover has a long history within Mesa’s Gallium3D codebase but in more recent years it’s been barely worked on compared to the Rusticl driver that is a much better option these days. Clover rarely sees any code changes these days and hasn’t in years — Clover used to be worked on by AMD even way back in the day before settling on what would become their ROCm compute stack. Clover has no active developers contributing and it’s really time to let it go so that Rusticl is the OpenCL solution without any confusion, complete with its OpenCL 3.0 support and other shiny features.
With Mesa Git, there is a message that “Clover will be removed in Mesa 25.2” as the Mesa feature release due out in Q3-2025. The Meson option for Clover also now marks it as deprecated.
This merge to Mesa 25.1 by Eric Engestrom lands the code formally deprecating Clover. The Clover code itself will likely be stripped out of Mesa Git shortly after the Mesa 26.1 code branching in mid-April.
