[GSOC] greetings

[Dave Airlie]

On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 8:42 AM, Антонов Николай <ostinru at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello, all!
> I am Antonov Nikolay. I am s third year student of Computer Science in
> Kostroma State Technological University, Russian Federation. And I would
> like to take part in GSOC 2011 in xorg project.
>
> I realy like 2 ideas:
> 1) Open Source PRIME multi-gpu support
> 2) Support Graphics Card hot-switch.
> Both have similar idea but different implementation.
> First already have pice of code(it would be a nice start point!). But I
> think that copying data from one video card to another is bad idea(it is
> slowdown performance and integrate card never poweroff). So, second idea
> looks better (but it seems harder).

So I was going to drop these from the project list this year as I'm
not sure I can wait :-)

I also wasn't planning on offering to mentor this year due to personal
time reasons, but maybe I'll change my mind, I need to lookup the
dates for GSOC.

wrt to these two projects,

the PRIME work is currently being redone, I was able to play openarena
on an nv50 displaying on an ironlake yesterday afternoon. I'm also
hoping Ben can get the nvidia PCOPY engine going. I'm hoping to push
the various bits upstream on this effort and at try and figure out how
to configure things for users. I'll hopefully write up a design
document so people can review the design before I push the code out.

The hot-switch work is a lot more work, we really need to implement
ARB_robustness extension in the GL drivers we care about, and then
port compositors to use the GLX_create_context API so the composting
can handle the GPU switch happening. I've got most of the X server
side duplication working but there is a lot of validation of a lot of
corner cases to be done before I'd be happy pushing it (in my dynerama
branch of my Xserver).

I'm also pursuing GPU hotplug efforts with the USB gpu, and I'm sort
of thinking the X server needs a lot of rework to get all of this
going.

Dave.