[Qemu-devel] GSoC 2011: S3 Trio, AHCI

[Roland Elek]

Dear Qemu developers,

First, I'd like to reintroduce myself, as my university and official 
duties prevented me from being active in the community since last year. 
I am Roland Elek, a student from Hungary, and a successful student 
participant of Google Summer of Code 2010. This year, I would like to 
participate again. I know I'm a bit late, but I'm still hoping to get 
things arranged before the deadline.

Last year, I worked on AHCI emulation with Alex as my mentor. Do you 
think a proper summer project could be proposed from what is still 
missing? If so, can I kindly ask someone to give me some pointers to 
what the project needs the most, and where I should look first for 
things to include in my proposal? Also, if the idea is feasible, would 
there be someone who could be my mentor?

Last year, I was also interested in working on S3 Trio emulation. This 
year, the same idea is on the ideas list. The hardware is pretty 
thoroughly documented through source code and textual documentation, and 
I'm already familiar with adding PCI devices to Qemu, so I do see a 
rough outline of how I would implement it.

However, last year, Paul Brook commented [1] that he wasn't convinced 
about the usefulness of emulating an S3 Trio or Virge card, because of 
performance reasons. He suggested that accelerating the 2D engine would 
be tricky because the framebuffer is exposed to the guest. This might be 
just me not fully understanding his point, but isn't this also the case 
with the Cirrus Logic GD5446 card?

He also suggested paravirtualization for 3D acceleration. Do you think 
it would make a good summer project?

Thank you in advance for your help.

Regards,
Roland

[1] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2010-04/msg00012.html