[Nouveau] Project ideas for GSoC/EVoC

[Martin Peres]

On 15/10/17 22:13, Karol Herbst wrote:
> Hi everybody,
> 
> currently on the Xorg Wiki page [1] there are only three projects
> ideas, two being quite similiar:
> 1. Instruction scheduling
> 2. Maxwell Video Accel Decoding
> 3. Kepler Video Accel Encoding
> and also the reference to our Trello board.
> 
> Because I don't expect any student interested in a GSoC/EVoC project
> to read our wiki or trello, I am sure to attract more students, we
> should give more project examples, best if those are all in different
> areas of the driver.
> 
> I am fine with writing and adding new ideas on the wiki, but it would
> be nice if you come up with interesting projects as well, so that I
> can work on those and add them to the wiki.
> 
> My spontaneous ideas are:
> 
> * Better handling of OOM situations:
> ** more swapping to system memory
> ** memory usage reporting to userspace

That sounds way over the scope of a GSoC.
> 
> * Performance analysis:
> ** what are Noveaus most hit bottlenecks
> ** how easy is it to figure those out
> ** improve/write tools and nouveaus support for those to figure those
> out (maybe more counters needed, something else?)

Yes, this is definitely more doable! Being able to run frameretracer on
nouveau would be ideal, as it is an impressive tool to debug performance
issue on Intel platforms (and it may already somewhat work).

> 
> * initial Vulkan driver
> 
> * OpenCL
> ** finishing up what we already have
> ** pass the CTS

Well, I know you are optimistic, but that sounds impossible to someone
who is not already a contributor!

> 
> * experimental nir support (why not if somebody wants to spend time on this?)

Yes, that could be a good one. This is a pretty self-contained project.
Not sure this is what we want to be working towards, but anything we can
do to reduce our workload is appreciated :)

> 
> * some super difficult compiler optimizations
> ** which ones indeed?

I would rather go for implementing a lot of simple ones, and hope that
the student will stay long enough to get to the useful ones ;)

> 
> * random reclocking stuff
> ** big enough for an entire GSoC/EVoC project?
> ** Roy, Ben: Status on Fermi/Tesla

Big enough? It is big-enough for a decade apparently given how slow we
have been :s

> 
> And because I don't just go ahead and add those things, I also would
> like to get your feedback on the ideas I mentioned here. In the end I
> would like to get 10 or more ideas written down somewhere, maybe even
> on the Xorg wiki page, but then it would be like 50% Nouveau, but this
> shouldn't be our problem.

Thanks for doing this, we need to get more contributors, and this is the
first step!

Martin