Multi-GPU, Remote Wayland Might Be Summer Work

There's a chance we might see multi-GPU and remote support heading to Weston / Wayland this summer.

It's getting into the season of Google Summer of Code and the first student has approached the X.Org / Wayland developers about some summer work.

Николай Антонов, or more easily as Nikolay Antonov, has approached the Wayland team about a few ideas he has for working on this summer. The Russian student expressed interest in multi-GPU support, remote Wayland, and possibly back-light control.

As far as the multi-GPU work, Antonov has to say, "I think to do gpu hot-switch will be very difficult, but it's possible to implement running applications on another gpu (I hope)." In terms of remote Wayland, "absence of such feature is one of the most criticised/controversial disadvantage of wayland."

The student approached the developers this morning on the mailing list. The multi-GPU support for Wayland might be very ambitious in its own right for a student to complete over the course of one summer without any previous Wayland/DRM driver experience. At least though it's not as ambitious as writing an OpenGL 4.1 state tracker in one summer, which was proposed last year and ultimately rejected by developers.

Last year there was also a project to provide remote Wayland support, but it wasn't successfully completed.

The student still needs to apply and be approved, but let's hope there's some exciting improvements to Wayland (and Mesa/Gallium3D) this summer via students participating in Google Summer of Code. For now you can read about the GSoC 2011 accomplishments.

Other potential GSoC ideas are expressed on this X.Org Wiki page, which range from working with Nouveau developers to understand and implement NVIDIA's hardware-monitoring engine (PCOUNTER) to working on the R600g LLVM compiler back-end to improving Nouveau GPU recovery to improving the Gallium3D Xorg state tracker.