3 ms·

Any way to use Metal instead of OpenCL now?

• capableweb 6y ago
  AFAIK, the main contributors are all on linux (or alike) systems, so you're unlikely to see Metal support out-of-the-box. Although, with the new backend/plugin interface added in this release, outside contributors can it themselves if they really need it.
• jeroenhd 6y ago
  What's the benefit of Metal in this use case? Are there any noticeable speedups in other brute forcing tools that switched to Apple's proprietary API? Given that OpenCL works on every decent modern platform and GPU brand I doubt much effort will be put into Metal unless someone familiar with the API and willing to put in the extra work joins the team of maintainers or creates a fork.
  • Hamuko 6y ago
    >What's the benefit of Metal in this use case? Continued usage on macOS if you care about that kind of a thing since Apple has deprecated OpenCL support.
    • jeroenhd 6y ago
      TIL. That's awful, but then again I'd expect nothing less from Apple. It's a miracle they even supported open standards in the first place. As long as Apple keeps OpenCL around, even if it's deprecated, these tools should still work. I'd expect that only the announcement of complete removal of OpenCL support would be enough to actually make hashcat put in the extra effort of writing a special Apple backend like that. Maybe they're generous or bored and do it before that, but I wouldn't expect them to in the near future.
      • continuational 6y ago
        It's not such a miracle - all companies like standards until they have sufficiently many apps on their platform - then they switch to proprietary to prevent app portability to competing platforms.