0009770: Hashcat 7.1.2 fails to detect a usable OpenCL device on Kali Linux 2026.2 in VMware

[tucker4051]

On a fresh installation of Kali Linux 2026.2 running in VMware, Hashcat 7.1.2 is unable to use the CPU through OpenCL.

Initially, running Hashcat produced:

clGetPlatformIDs(): CL_PLATFORM_NOT_FOUND_KHR

ATTENTION! No OpenCL, HIP or CUDA compatible platform found.

After installing the available OpenCL/PoCL packages, Hashcat detected the PoCL platform and the virtualised AMD Ryzen 5 7600 CPU, but attempts to run a cracking job returned:

No devices found/left.

The same Hashcat command, VMware configuration and host computer work correctly on the previous Kali Linux release. After installing that older release, Hashcat detects the PoCL CPU device and successfully completes the cracking job.

This appears to rule out VMware configuration, the physical CPU, the host NVIDIA GPU driver, and recent host display changes as the primary cause. The issue appears specific to Kali Linux 2026.2 and its Hashcat, OpenCL or PoCL package stack.

Example command:

hashcat -m 0 -a 0 '5f4dcc3b5aa765d61d8327deb882cf99' /usr/share/wordlists/rockyou.txt

Environment:
Affected release: Kali Linux 2026.2
Host CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 7600
Hypervisor: VMware
Guest GPU: VMware SVGA II Adapter
Hashcat version: 7.1.2
OpenCL implementation: PoCL

On the working older Kali release (2026.1), Hashcat reports a PoCL OpenCL platform and detects the CPU device successfully:

OpenCL API (OpenCL 3.0 PoCL 6.0+debian)
Device 0000001: AMD Ryzen 5 7600 6-Core Processor

Expected behaviour:

Hashcat should detect the PoCL CPU device and execute the cracking workload on Kali Linux 2026.2.

Actual behaviour:

Kali Linux 2026.2 either reports that no OpenCL platform is available or, after installing PoCL, reports No devices found/left, while the same setup works correctly on the previous Kali release.

[Chick3nman]

After installing the available OpenCL/PoCL packages, Hashcat detected the PoCL platform and the virtualised AMD Ryzen 5 7600 CPU, but attempts to run a cracking job returned:

No devices found/left.

This is because hashcat, by default, will not select the CPU as it is intended to be used with a GPU or similar. You need to manually enable CPU usage by adding -D 1 to your command. This does not appear to be a bug and instead just a missing flag in your command.

[PenguinKeeper7]

Might be a nice feature to auto-select the CPU if it's the only detected device (maybe with a warning) without requiring -D 1? I know "auto-selecting" behaviour can be confusing but I think it'd be more of a positive change than negative

[tucker4051]

For context, the reason I initially suspected a package or release issue was that the behaviour only occurred on the fresh Kali 2026.2 installation, while both 2026.1 and the upgraded 2026.3 environment worked with the same VMware and host configuration.

[Chick3nman]

Might be a nice feature to auto-select the CPU if it's the only detected device (maybe with a warning) without requiring -D 1? I know "auto-selecting" behaviour can be confusing but I think it'd be more of a positive change than negative

I've considered this a few times but it leads to the alternate user issue where a GPU becomes lost, it defaults to the CPU suddenly (with usually a runtime of unknown or suspect quality) and suddenly we get "why is going so slow?" or things becomes unstable/fail because of the runtime. I think we could do it but definitely with a warning when defaulting down.

[Raghad-Aljo]

i was facing the exact thing and this worked for me Ran into this exact issue on Kali 2026.2 in VMware (no GPU passthrough). pocl-opencl-icd is gone from the repos now, so that fix no longer applies. Here's what worked for me, step by step:

1. Install Mesa's OpenCL backend instead of PoCL (PoCL isn't available anymore):
   sudo apt install -y mesa-opencl-icd ocl-icd-libopencl1 clinfo
2. If you get a disk space error during install, check usage and clear space (my VM disk was maxed out):
   df -h /
   sudo apt clean
   sudo apt autoremove -y
3. After installing, clinfo/hashcat -I may still say "No devices found/left" — Mesa's Rusticl backend is disabled by default. Enable it with:

RUSTICL_ENABLE=llvmpipe clinfo
4. Even with a device now visible, Hashcat still won't use it by default (as mentioned above in this thread) — you need -D 1 to include CPU devices:
RUSTICL_ENABLE=llvmpipe hashcat -m 7300 -a 0 -D 1 hash.txt wordlist.txt
That combo (Mesa + RUSTICL_ENABLE=llvmpipe + -D 1) got it fully working for me on 2026.2. Hope this saves someone the troubleshooting time.

[r0adk1ng66]

Raghad-Aljo on Jul 11 Resolution worked fine for me. Thank you!

Only change i made was on step 4. " RUSTICL_ENABLE=llvmpipe hashcat -m 7300 -a 0 -D 1 hash.txt wordlist.txt",
I replaced "-m7300" with "-m 22000" for the file type I was using.

Nore: Also appended -w 3 and -S to the cmd line for Cracking Performance.