On Tue, 30 Jan 2024 12:28:27 PST (-0800), stefanha@gmail.com wrote:
> On Tue, 30 Jan 2024 at 14:40, Palmer Dabbelt <palmer@dabbelt.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, 15 Jan 2024 08:32:59 PST (-0800), stefanha@gmail.com wrote:
>> > Dear QEMU and KVM communities,
>> > QEMU will apply for the Google Summer of Code and Outreachy internship
>> > programs again this year. Regular contributors can submit project
>> > ideas that they'd like to mentor by replying to this email before
>> > January 30th.
>>
>> It's the 30th, sorry if this is late but I just saw it today. +Alistair
>> and Daniel, as I didn't sync up with anyone about this so not sure if
>> someone else is looking already (we're not internally).
>>
>> > Internship programs
>> > ---------------------------
>> > GSoC (https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/) and Outreachy
>> > (https://www.outreachy.org/) offer paid open source remote work
>> > internships to eligible people wishing to participate in open source
>> > development. QEMU has been part of these internship programs for many
>> > years. Our mentors have enjoyed helping talented interns make their
>> > first open source contributions and some former interns continue to
>> > participate today.
>> >
>> > Who can mentor
>> > ----------------------
>> > Regular contributors to QEMU and KVM can participate as mentors.
>> > Mentorship involves about 5 hours of time commitment per week to
>> > communicate with the intern, review their patches, etc. Time is also
>> > required during the intern selection phase to communicate with
>> > applicants. Being a mentor is an opportunity to help someone get
>> > started in open source development, will give you experience with
>> > managing a project in a low-stakes environment, and a chance to
>> > explore interesting technical ideas that you may not have time to
>> > develop yourself.
>> >
>> > How to propose your idea
>> > ----------------------------------
>> > Reply to this email with the following project idea template filled in:
>> >
>> > === TITLE ===
>> >
>> > '''Summary:''' Short description of the project
>> >
>> > Detailed description of the project that explains the general idea,
>> > including a list of high-level tasks that will be completed by the
>> > project, and provides enough background for someone unfamiliar with
>> > the codebase to do research. Typically 2 or 3 paragraphs.
>> >
>> > '''Links:'''
>> > * Wiki links to relevant material
>> > * External links to mailing lists or web sites
>> >
>> > '''Details:'''
>> > * Skill level: beginner or intermediate or advanced
>> > * Language: C/Python/Rust/etc
>>
>> I'm not 100% sure this is a sane GSoC idea, as it's a bit open ended and
>> might have some tricky parts. That said it's tripping some people up
>> and as far as I know nobody's started looking at it, so I figrued I'd
>> write something up.
>>
>> I can try and dig up some more links if folks thing it's interesting,
>> IIRC there's been a handful of bug reports related to very small loops
>> that run ~10x slower when vectorized. Large benchmarks like SPEC have
>> also shown slowdowns.
>
> Hi Palmer,
> Performance optimization can be challenging for newcomers. I wouldn't
> recommend it for a GSoC project unless you have time to seed the
> project idea with specific optimizations to implement based on your
> experience and profiling. That way the intern has a solid starting
> point where they can have a few successes before venturing out to do
> their own performance analysis.
Ya, I agree. That's part of the reason why I wasn't sure if it's a
good idea. At least for this one I think there should be some easy to
understand performance issue, as the loops that go very slowly consist
of a small number of instructions and go a lot slower.
I'm actually more worried about this running into a rabbit hole of
adding new TCG operations or even just having no well defined mappings
between RVV and AVX, those might make the project really hard.
> Do you have the time to profile and add specifics to the project idea
> by Feb 21st? If that sounds good to you, I'll add it to the project
> ideas list and you can add more detailed tasks in the coming weeks.
I can at least dig up some of the examples I ran into, there's been a
handful filtering in over the last year or so.
This one
<https://gist.github.com/compnerd/daa7e68f7b4910cb6b27f856e6c2beba>
still has a much more than 10x slowdown (73ms -> 13s) with
vectorization, for example.