Mesa, Wayland, X Will Get Some Summer Love

Google today has announced their 2011 student projects for the Google Summer of Code marathon. Four of the X.Org / Mesa / Wayland projects were accepted. Listed below are the accepted projects and a few notes.

MLAA For Mesa: This is a GSoC project we didn't talk about previously on Phoronix as it wasn't mentioned much (at all?) on the mailing lists. However, it's quite a good project. It's for bringing anti-aliasing support to Mesa and its drivers. MLAA is the Morphological Anti-aliasing type.

Remote Display For Wayland: This is a Wayland Display Server project for supporting a proxy compositing server with the client, a pseudo-client to the real compositing server, and to provide communication support over the network between the proxy compositor and pseudo-client. In theory, all native Wayland clients should work just fine in such a manner.

OpenCL Gallium3D State Tracker: At long last, will we finally see OpenCL support in open-source drivers? This project is to work on the Clover Mesa branch for bringing up Zack Rusin's OpenCL state tracker in the Gallium3D world and to utilize LLVM's Clang as the OpenCL compiler. See this Phoronix post for more details. The OpenCL state tracker came about after this very ambitious young developer first proposed writing an OpenGL 4.1 state tracker over the course of a summer.

XKB In XCB: The last accepted project is for bringing up XKB keyboard support in XCB, the X C Binding.

The accepted projects are mentioned on this Google page.

Sadly, missing from this list of accepted projects is multi-GPU and hot-switching support, which would have been great to see in the world of Optimus, Synergy, and other multi-GPU solutions becoming common.

There will also not be a Gallium3D WebM/VP8 state tracker. Why did the Gallium3D state tracker for Gallium3D's own video format lose out? There weren't any X.Org developers willing to serve as mentors for the work.

There will also not be any Direct3D HLSL compiler for LLVM.

Good luck to all of the GSoC student developers and hopefully a great number of them will end up materializing and eventually make their way to being merged into the mainline trees.