AMD guys: commit messages?

[Marek Olšák]

There are a few useful prerequisites for contributing to Mesa and
being efficient:

1) Know OpenGL and GLSL
Tutorials: http://ogldev.atspace.co.uk/
You need to know the API one way or another. Eventually, you want to
switch to the official OpenGL, GLSL, and extension specifications as
your primary source of information.

2) Know the graphics pipeline
Articles: https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2011/07/09/a-trip-through-the-graphics-pipeline-2011-index/
I was surprised about how accurately Z/Stencil optimizations were
described in part 7. It seems pretty dense. Oh and BTW, it's about
DX11, but I see that as an advantage. The hardware documentation uses
DX11 naming conventions, so why not just get to use them now.

3) Know the Mesa code base
Knowing the code and the overall architecture is 50% of success. This
applies to any project.

4) Know the hardware registers and ISA
There is open documentation, but it doesn't contain everything. In
such case, the code is the documentation.

Marek

On Tue, Dec 8, 2015 at 2:43 PM, Ernst Sjöstrand <ernstp at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello list!
>
> I lurk here and try to follow Mesa/DRI and most specifically Radeon
> driver development, report bugs, test new stuff and help get the bugs
> closed and so on...
>
> However I see that the commit messages for AMD/Radeon are often very
> unhelpful. They don't state the motivation behind the commits. Is this
> a optimization, a nice-to-have cleanup or does this actually fix
> something? What does this fix?
> Are there tests or bugreports related?
>
> Improving this could make it easier for new developers to start
> contributing in the long run also!
>
> Examples:
>
> http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/commit/?id=d5a5dbd71f0e8756494809025ba2119efdf26373
> http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/commit/?id=338d7bf0531a10d90db75ad333f7e0a31693641f
> http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/commit/?id=4ebcf5194d98b47bd9e8a72b7418054708b14750
>
> This is also in the mesa dev guidelines, www.mesa3d.org/devinfo.html :
> "Patch fix is not clearly described. For example, a commit message of
> only a single line, no description of the bug, no mention of bugzilla,
> etc."
>
> Regards!
> //Ernst
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