GSoC: KMSifying cirrus?

[Matt Turner]

On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 4:44 PM, Eric Anholt <eric at anholt.net> wrote:
> 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.

This is kind of already my planned GSoC project...

I'm planning to implement KMS for Permedia3/4 series cards for the
purpose of providing an example KMS implementation. I'm also planning
to continue Jesse Barnes' documentation and get it into a usable state
where someone would be able to pick it up and start coding pretty
easily.

Matt