GSoC 2014 Yielded Some Improvements For Mesa/X.Org This Year

Google's annual Summer of Code project ended last month and I've been meaning to write a brief update about the work done by the student open-source developers on their X.Org-related work.

Here's my quick recap of what I could find about the results of each of the student X.Org projects for GSoC 2014. Sadly they weren't all blogging and sharing their progress visibly, so if I missed out on any milestones, feel free to post in the forums.

- Samuel Pitoiset's work once again seemed very successful for implementing NVIDIA performance counter support within the open-source Nouveau driver. These performance counters will hopefully come down the road in Linux 3.19 after this summer working on how to expose them to user-space, prototyping the code, etc. Pitoiset will hopefully continue to stick around the Nouveau community.

- Emil Velikov was working on WGL support for Waffle. He's done a lot of work to Waffle and the code can be found currently via his GitHub repository. For those unfamiliar with it, Waffle is a library for selecting an OpenGL API and windowing system at run-time and supports GLX/EGL, OpenGL 3.3, Wayland with OpenGL ES, and other combinations. Emil's work seems successful and perhaps more importantly is that he's sticking around and doing other things to the open-source Linux graphics stack. Emil this summer also worked on GLX_MESA_query_renderer for all drivers, Android build improvements, and is now even serving as the Mesa release manager.

- Student developer Bruno Jiménez was tackling the area of improving the compute memory pool / better OpenCL support for the open-source drivers. In August Bruno published Mesa patches for R600 Gallium3D and the Clover state tracker with compute-related enhancements. This summer he's also been active on the mailing list and in some bug reports.

- Stephen Chandler Paul this summer tasked himself with adding Wacom tablet support to Wayland. Within the tablet-support branch of libinput are patches by Stephen for working on the tablet input support for this library that can be used by Wayland compositors for input handling.

The GSoC 2014 page is currently only listing the four projects above on their page, but at the start of the summer were also three more projects:

- Markus Wick was working on some GLAMOR performance tuning. There were a few GLAMOR patches in June from Wick including into xserver Git but exactly how far along he got with his GLAMOR performance work is unclear.

- Aleksandr Mezin came up with a project of writing a lightweight Qt Quick based compositing window manager for X. Unfortunately I can't find much about what happened with this work.

- Fabian Bieler sought to work on ARB_tessellation_shader support for Mesa. Unfortunately for this one again I can't find any patches and the GL_ARB_tessellation_shader implementation for Mesa has yet to land with apparently now this important OpenGL extension is being worked on by some Intel OTC developers.

Update: Some more details on these last three projects via this forum post.