There Are A Ton Of Interesting GSoC Projects This Year: Dav1d GPU Compute, Wayland, Rust

Google announced the list of accepted students/projects this year for their annual Summer of Code program.

This year the long list of accepted projects has some really interesting and high profile ideas. In going through the list, some of the ones that caught my interest included:

- A Wayland application proxy to support forwarding Wayland protocol information and local shared memory updates over a socket.

- Weston color management support.

- Blender support for VR headsets through OpenXR.

- Porting Wine to NetBSD AMD64.

- KDE digiKam support for AI facial recognition using OpenCV's DNN module.

- Under the GNOME umbrella is work on converting more GStreamer plugins to be written in Rust.

- Work on Intel and OpenCV code for deep learning based super resolution upscaling of low resolution images.

- Working on VLC's new Qt5 interface redesign.

- The ability for Perl 6 to produce and execute self-contained binaries on Windows / Linux / macOS.

- Making Android SDK Tools available on Debian.

- Developing a migration assistant for GNOME to help migrate data for new users/installations.

- Working on "gtk4-rs" as the GTK 4 tool-kit Rust language bindings.

- OpenGL rendering for LibreCAD 3.

- Furtherlong along the binary utilities offered by LLVM as an alternative to GNU Binutils.

- Virtual memory compression for FreeBSD.

- VideoLAN/VLC working on NVIDIA NVDEC hardware-accelerated decoding support.

- Support for offloading some of the dav1d AV1 video decoder's work to GPUs using compute shaders in OpenGL/Vulkan/Metal/Direct3D.

- ARM NEON optimizations for dav1d.

- Google Drive support for GVfs in GNOME.

- Support for AVX with QEMU's Tiny Code Generator (TCG).

- Porting WebKit2 to Haiku.

- Improving Btrfs file-system support in Haiku.

- Working on better parallelizing GCC with threads.

- HEIF support in FFmpeg.

The list of accepted projects/students can be found at the GSoC site. We'll certainly be monitoring the progress of these interesting student development projects over the summer months and certainly hope most of them will prove successful.