There's More Hope For Mesa & X This Summer

While student registration for this year's Google of Summer of Code (GSoC) has not yet commenced, it's looking quite hopeful for the X.Org / Mesa work this summer. There was an OpenGL 4.1 state tracker that was proposed and some developers are calling this too ambitious. Just days ago there was then a multi-GPU PRIME and hot-switching proposal. This though is not the end of the list.

In terms of the multi-GPU PRIME and GPU hot-switching proposals, David Airlie, who previously has worked on each of these items, is a bit weary. He's not sure if he will be able to mentor this summer and "I was going to drop these from the project list this year as I'm not sure I can wait."

David goes on to add in his message that the PRIME work is being redone and he's already been able to play OpenArena on an NV50 while the display is connected to an Intel Ironlake graphics processor. David is hoping that the Nouveau developers will be able to enable the NVIDIA PCOPY engine and that he'll be able to upstream all of this rewritten PRIME work.

Dave is also concerned about the amount of work that would be needed for GPU hot-switching within the X Server and compositing managers. He also points out that GPU hot-switching on Linux will become more important with USB-based GPU DRM support now set to appear in the Linux 2.6.39 kernel.

There's also a brand new GSoC proposal this morning. An Indian student developer has proposed XCB keyboard support in this e-mail.