[Freedreno] [GSoC-15] Enabling Freedreno on Android

[Ilia Mirkin]

On Mon, Mar 16, 2015 at 4:02 PM, Emil Velikov <emil.l.velikov at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 16/03/15 19:00, Ilia Mirkin wrote:
>> On Mon, Mar 16, 2015 at 2:55 PM, Emil Velikov <emil.l.velikov at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On 16/03/15 17:48, Ilia Mirkin wrote:
>>>> I'm fairly ignorant about android stuff, but I think that while a lot
>>>> of pieces exist, no one has taken the effort to put it all together.
>>> Which pieces are you thinking about "putting together" ? Imho that alone
>>> might be a monumental task which far exceeds a single GSoC.
>>
>> No clue. Whatever pieces are necessary to get me an android build on a
>> device (preferably with a display)
> Practically every Android has this, and those are irrelevant from a
> driver's POV.
>
> The Android graphics stack is roughly:
>  - libEGL drivers - mesa vs proprietary solutions.
>  - HAL(glue) - *gralloc* and *hwcomposer*.
>  - Kernel + modules.
>
> Although they should be mostly identical independent of the Android flavour.
>
>> using freedreno as its gles driver.
>> At the end of the day I want an image I can flash onto the device and
>> that's it. I believe that CM & co provide all of the pieces of this
>> experience except for the free drivers. However a different approach
>> towards this goal would be fine by me as well.
>>
>> Otherwise the output of the GSoC would be too intangible and of much
>> less value.
>> But again, I'm speaking without any serious knowledge of
>> android internals, so perhaps this is infeasible for one reason or
>> another.
>>
> I feel that you're leaning towards "getting it into some Android, to be
> used/tested", whereas I'm thinking at "get it upstream, and spread the
> word so that Androids can pick it up".

Yep, those are two separate projects. My belief is that there's going
to be little interest from those projects in doing the hard work of
hooking everything up. This is why I'm suggesting a focus on
delivering something that actually works, rather than just another
piece that needs to be glued on at the end.

>
> Integration can be a pain sometimes, so I'd guess a quick email towards
> Android X, Y and Z to get the feel might be nice.
>
> Something like "I'm doing GSoC about... Can we get someone to help out
> during the integration with your project ?"

At the end of the day this will be determined by the student + mentor,
but I don't think that'll be an effective strategy. I think much more
effective would be "hey, i got it working for this combo, cut & paste
this to your nearly-identical project".

  -ilia