[Openchrome-devel] RoadMap for the next year

[James Simmons]

Hello.

	Its been awhile since I have done one of these reports but it is 
much needed. Especially since the project is reaching a stable point on 
several fronts. Looking back we can see it has been a busy year. After 3 
years of code decay in June of 2012 we release 0.3.0. This moved our xorg
driver to the newer EXA and RandR apis. Since then many more bugs have 
been fixed and the amount of bugs reported have been kept to a minimum.
Our xorg driver is now used in most distrubtions. In October of 2012 this 
project started the migration over to freedesktop.org. After the release
of the xorg driver the focus shifted over to harding the drm kernel driver.
We have now reached the point were VGA, LVDS, and now HDMI/DVI are
supported.
	Even with all this work for the last year we still have a lot more 
work to do. For the last couple of weeks we have been preparing the 
drm-openchrome tree for merger into the development branch of the DRI 
project. Over the next month we will be working for this to happen. The 
goal for the coming year to support all the possible outputs for VIA 
hardware. Currently more work needs to be done for pre-HDMI encoder DVI 
support and support for external encoder which will mainly covers TV 
support. DisplayPort is missing for the newer platforms as well. Also look 
forward to VX11 support in the near future since VIA was kind enough to 
send me a development board recently.
	The largest project ahead of us is supporting accelerated graphics
with KMS. This project has spent the last two years playing catch up and 
we still lag behind. Currently we have no Gallium driver and no acceleration
for our Xorg driver for KMS. I have been looking for the shortest path 
to tackle this and have come to the conclusion that the best approach will
to take advantage of glamor. With Glamour our xorg driver will be layered 
on top of OpenGL which will help to limit duplicate efforts of VIA hardware
support. So very soon you will see the work to enable our xorg driver with 
glamor. At first I will use the soft raster to validate it with our xorg 
driver and once that is done this project will move on to start development
on a Gallium driver. My guess is it will take 6 months to get Glamor 
working properly with our xorg driver and then we will spend the next 12 
months after working on the Gallium driver to get it to a point of 
stabiity and functionality. I like to thank everyone for taking the time 
to test and work with us for this project.