[Mesa-dev] Summer of Code ideas (maybe just an idea wishlist?)

[Ilia Mirkin]

On Fri, Mar 13, 2015 at 12:46 AM, Matt Turner <mattst88 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Here are some ideas I think might be reasonable GSoC ideas.
>
>  - GLSL linking in NIR
>      - Would allow us to stop doing optimizations and other expensive
> things on GLSL IR
>
>  - SSA in the i965/fs backend, and an SSA-based register allocator
>
>  - Improve instruction scheduling in i965 (Nouveau has this on the
> Wiki as well. Maybe potential for code reuse)

FWIW the nouveau thing would probably not involve a lot of reuse...
the instructions are fairly different, and a lot of the nouveau
project would have to be actually figuring out what _is_ a better
schedule rather than just implementing one. [Also nouveau presently
has *no* scheduling in place... so almost _anything_ would likely be
an improvement.]

>
>  - Maybe some OpenGL features (???), although lots of things are
> already in progress, like tessellation and compute shaders and others
> are probably on the critical path
>
> Are these good GSoC projects? Good -- being a combination of
> characteristics like usefulness, feasibility, well defined, and
> properly sized.
>
> Feel free to comment on them and to reply with your own. We can pick
> some we like and put them on the wiki.

Another project that I think I mentioned on IRC is to go through the
ES extension list and add in all the "easy" ones (i.e. ones that are
already all or mostly implemented by desktop features), of which there
are a _ton_ (probably like 20). I'm just talking about the OES/EXT/KHR
ones, not the vendor ones. The majority would be modifying the various
paths to allow the logic to be executed in ES contexts and to
modify/add piglit tests verifying that the functionality can be used
in ES. Here are a bunch of differences between what the nvidia blob
exposes and mesa for the same hw:

http://people.freedesktop.org/~imirkin/glxinfo/glxinfo.html#p=es&b=version&g=NVIDIA%20GF1xx%20%28GeForce%20400%2C%20500%29&diff

Admittedly some of those are ES3.1-only, but far from all.

  -ilia