GSoC: KMSifying cirrus?

[Eric Anholt]

On Wed, 24 Mar 2010 00:02:20 -0400, Daniel Gnoutcheff <daniel at gnoutcheff.name> wrote:
> Hello all!
> 
> I'm planing to apply for GSoC, and Xorg is one of the projects I'm
> considering. I see that "KMS a non-KMSed driver" is on the ideas list. 
> One of the ideas I'm considering is the KMSification of the cirrus 
> driver (at least the alpine half of it). Would there be any interest in 
> such a project?
> 
> Cirrus cards are kind of obsolete, but I suppose *would* be nice to have 
> one more KMS driver, perhaps a relatively simple one that could be an 
> easy-to-follow model for other KMSification efforts.
> 
> I've got a real CL-GD-5446 to do some testing with, and I've spent a bit 
> of time tracking/testing/exploring the git repos for the kernel and for 
> various xorg projects, so I do have a tiny head start there.
> 
> More generally, I'm interested in *anything* that will help the free 
> desktop succeed. :) So I'm choosing projects primarily on the basis of 
> what I'm best prepared to take on, and where I can be most helpful.
> 
> Thanks for any feedback!

Sounds like a fun project, and doable.  I'd just recommend that you
reduce the scope slightly from a full KMS driver to an unaccelerated KMS
driver -- there's going to be a lot of typing and bugfixing before you
even get a picture on the screen.  Once you've got an unaccelerated KMS
driver, there are a couple of trees out there for X drivers that sit on
KMS that you could take advantage of to get a desktop up and running,
without having to worry about rearchitecting an existing 2D driver.

I think there would be a lot of value beyond just cirrus users in having
an unaccelerated KMS example driver -- plenty of (old) hardware out
there that could have much nicer linux support using KMS if people saw
it was easy to build, since most older accelerators aren't that
interesting today.
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