How To Help Improve, Develop Mesa Drivers

If you aren't satisfied with seeing Mesa lag far behind the latest OpenGL standard and come up short when in the areas of performance and features compared to some of the proprietary graphics drivers, they always welcome additional help.

From Mesa's help-wanted documentation, which was updated this week (CGit), some of the specific areas needing additional love within Mesa include:

- For the non-developers that are interested in advancing Mesa but without hacking on any C code, you can still be of assistance. One of their recommended areas is simply driver testing and testing out patches as they hit the mesa-dev list. Particularly for the Radeon and i965 drivers, patches frequently bomb the Mesa development list from different features like MSAA to enabling new GL extensions to various other bits. Testing these yet-to-be-merged patches and reporting your results can be of use for more diverse testing across a range of hardware and software configurations.

- There's plenty of Mesa bugs on the FreeDesktop.org BugZilla where debugging help is appreciated for those don't mind diving into the code.

- Fixing compiler warnings or pushing a Mesa build through different compiler configurations (and compilers for that matter) can lead to improvements and better code quality.

- As done often at Phoronix, measuring the Mesa/Gallium3D driver performance in an effort to look for optimizations or performance regressions is often easy and visible. It's also quite easy with the Phoronix Test Suite software and related utilities.

- Piglit OpenGL conformance tests are welcome by upstream Mesa developers.

- Hitting specific items off the GL3/GL4 TODO list, the Gallium3D LLVM TODO list, DRI Missing Functionality, R600 TODO list, R300 TODO list, and Intel Gallium3D TODO lists all earn points too.

- If you are a student developer, you could also apply to be part of the X.Org EVoC program.