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Contents

Google Summer of Code 2013
Wine and the Google Summer of Code
Beware of Legal Requirements
Ideas

Google Summer of Code 2013

Wine is an accepted organization for GSoC 2013

This page collects some tips for students who want to work on Wine during the Summer of Code, and provides a few ideas for projects.

Wine and the Google Summer of Code

Do you:
- Know C?
- Have an idea for Wine that might help fix Wine bug 10000?
- If so, please introduce yourself on the wine-devel mailing list or the #winehackers IRC channel at freenode.net, and apply for a Google Summer of Code scholarship!
Hint/reminders:
- Look at PreviousSummersOfCode for previously accepted proposals / their results
- Do not forget: we can only support one proposal per application
- We cannot accept ReactOS proposals, so please only make proposals that will benefit Wine.
- Copying proposals verbatim will get your proposal deleted without even looking at it twice. You have to make your own proposal. See also PostgreSQL's Summer Of Code Advice

Beware of Legal Requirements

You must state that you will follow these minimal legal requirements during the SoC (and have done so in the past):

You are not allowed to read or reuse Windows source code (leaked source / Windows Research Kernel* / ...)
(* we are following the SFLC's advice)
You are not allowed to reverse engineer Windows files by disassembling or decompiling them
You are not allowed to analyze Windows files with the trace functions of Wine
People who work or have worked for Microsoft should probably not participate

Ideas

Your own idea

Possible mentors: We'll provide you with the appropriate mentor

If you have an idea, please post it on Wine Developers mailing list so we can help you with your idea and find out if it's realistic or not. Showing initiative and willing to discuss your idea greatly improves your chances of getting accepted. Even more so than taking one of the ideas below.
As long as you work hard and interact with the community and your mentor in a positive and constructive way you don't have to worry about not meeting all your goals.

Tools - Implement new control panel applets

Possible Mentors: We'll provide you with the appropriate mentor

Knowledge prerequisite: C

Difficulty: Easy to medium, depending on the controls you want to work on

Basic 3D and screen resizing (tests X 3D drivers via OpenGL from Wine, or verifies that Wine was compiled with OpenGL support).
Current network IP addresses, see IPaddress for inspiration.
List of fonts, see FontPage for inspiration.
Improve the Internet Explorer control panel: Configure proxy and cache settings and more.

Tools - Winetest Graphical User Interface

Possible Mentors: We'll provide you with the appropriate mentor

Knowledge prerequisite: C

Difficulty: Easy

Currently the only way to see test results in a nice synthetic format is to upload the report and view it at test.winehq.org.
It would be nice to have a mode in winetest.exe that would present a nice table of available tests with their results, ideally updated on the fly as tests are run.
The list could also be interactive and allow you to click on a test to run it again, view its result log, etc.

D3DX9 - Implement missing D3DX9 APIs

Possible Mentors: Stefan Dösinger, Matteo Bruni

Knowledge prerequisite: C, maybe some domain-specific knowledge related to the APIs you want to implement

Difficulty: Easy to medium, depending on the functions you want to work on

D3DX9 dlls contain various utility functions related to common 3D graphics tasks. For instance they contain math functions, functions for loading textures, compiling shaders and much more.
A good chunk of those APIs has been implemented but a lot is still missing, such as:
- some math functions (what's left is mostly about spherical harmonics and precomputed radiance transfer)
- some mesh functions (D3DXComputeNormals(), D3DXOptimizeVertices(), ...)
- a few texture functions
- quite a few ID3DXConstantTable methods
- various shader-related functions (D3DXGetShaderInputSemantics() and D3DXGetShaderOutputSemantics() to name two)
- effect framework bits and pieces
- fonts framework
The project would choose a reasonable subset of the missing functions and the work would consist of writing behavioral tests for those functions and actually implementing the functions themselves. We will help you in selecting a reasonably-sized subset of the API, suitable for a GSoC project.

Direct3D - Conformance / Performance / Interactive tests

Possible Mentors: Dan Kegel

Knowledge prerequisite: C

Difficulty: Medium

Even small demos show interesting problems in Wine (see e.g. http://bugs.winehq.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=3drad, http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21817 )
There are lots of tools (see GameEngines) that make developing tiny games easy; they often come with tutorials or examples that might let you isolate problems.
We would like to capture the problems these expose by writing conformance tests (possibly WINETEST_INTERACTIVE ones, if they can't be automated) or performance test tools (as part of programs/dxdiag, perhaps; see "Make dxdiag usable" below, and yagmark), or at the very least bug reports
It'd be nice to also fix some of the problems, too. For instance, figuring out why wine is slow at some app, and then fixing it, would be great.

Direct3DRM - Implement rendering for D3DRM

Possible Mentors: André Hentschel, Christian Costa

Knowledge prerequisite: C, COM

Difficulty: Medium

Direct3D Retained Mode is mostly a stub, it needs to interact with DirectX 8/9 to actually display something
Even if it's an old library and has been removed in Vista, there are small Games based on it

Richedit - implement Windowless mode

Possible Mentors: Maarten Lankhorst

Knowledge prerequisite: C

Difficulty: Medium

Richedit is supposed to support Windowless mode, and a number of apps use this. Wine has mostly a stub implementation, so there's lots of room for improvement. Maarten promises to help you with any COM problems you run into
DylanSmith has been working on this, after the SoC 2008 (See bug 5162).

Registry - implement merging between HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT and HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes

Possible Mentors: We'll provide you with the appropriate mentor

Knowledge prerequisite: C, Registry

Difficulty: Medium

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes and maybe more should get merged/mirrored with HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT.
There are already some tests, but more are needed.
See http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14771
AndreHentschel has been working on the tests.

CMD - implement more robust parser

Possible Mentors: Dan Kegel, Jason Edmeades

Knowledge prerequisite: C, CMD commands

Difficulty: Medium

http://kegel.com/wine/sweng/2010/ is a project to fix a number of small bugs in Wine's cmd.exe and friends, and to write testcases for it. It has helped bring to light certain flaws in cmd.exe's parsing of if/then/else and () blocks.
Somebody could quite usefully spend a summer bulking up the test cases for cmd and friends, fixing any remaining reported bugs, and improving the parser.

Cygwin - Improve Cygwin support under Wine

Possible Mentors: We'll provide you with the appropriate mentor

Knowledge prerequisite: C

Difficulty: Medium to hard

Wine currently doesn't support Cygwin very well, though several F/OSS programs use it for compiling/testing their Windows builds.
Several bugs prevent it from being useful for testing and building, e.g., VLC under Wine.

Improve dxdiag and/or dxdiagn

Possible Mentors: We'll provide you with the appropriate mentor

Knowledge prerequisite: C

Difficulty: Medium

First thing requested in a forum of a game: Send me the logs of msinfo and dxdiag.
dxdiag collects system information, and has interactive tests for ddraw, d3d, dsound, and dplay.
Two ways to go: make native dxdiag gui work better, or implement a builtin dxdiag gui, or both.
UCLA students are implementing builtin dxdiag gui for wine, see http://www.kegel.com/wine/sweng/2011 and http://code.google.com/p/yadxdiag/
Wine-specific tests, like a tiny subset of winetest, might be handy to identify whether the user's wine suffers from common gaming-related bugs.

Xinput / Xbox 360 controller compatibility

Possible Mentors: We'll provide you with the appropriate mentor

Knowledge prerequisite: C

Difficulty: Medium

Michael Gruber submitted patches from 2009 that appear to actually implement xinput:

There were two follow up threads in relation to this:

Implement OpenMP (vcomp.dll)

Possible Mentors: Dan Kegel, André Hentschel

Knowledge prerequisite: C, at least x86 assembler

Difficulty: Medium to hard

OpenMP is a shared memory multiprocessing API and vcomp.dll contains the Windows implementation for it.
See http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26688
Only two games are known to be affected at the moment.
Non-parallel fallback implementations might be useful?

MSXML - implement XPath 1.0 processor from scratch

Possible mentors: Nikolay Sivov

Knowledge prerequisite: C

Difficulty: Medium

The goal here is to stop using libxml2 for XPath, it's necessary to completely switch from libxml2. Important things to keep in mind:

changes should be incremental, with a fallback to libxml2 until new processor is fully functional.
processor should not depend on libxml2, including its DOM part. Preferably use existing DOM implementation at msxml level.
lots of tests need to be written. Cover every aspect of XPath specification is not possible during GSoC but tests should be easily extensible.
expression parser better be done with bison and a lexer could be written from scratch.

Portability - Port WineLib to a new architecture

Possible mentors: André Hentschel

Knowledge prerequisite: Assembler for the target

Difficulty: Medium, depending on the target

Wine can run WineLib applications on different CPU architectures, but needs at least some assembler code for that.
Suggested architectures: MIPS, Sparc64, x32.
You will also need a test system. Qemu is possible, but real hardware is recommended.

Implementing XACT sound dlls

Possible mentors: Andrew Eikum

Knowledge prerequisite: C

Difficulty: Medium

The goal here is to implement a subset of the Microsoft Cross-Platform Audio Creation Tool dlls, also known as xact. There are a few sections (xactengine, xaudio, x3daudio, xapof) involved, so only a portion would be done for the project. You should have (or read up on) experience with Linux sound systems (ALSA/OSS) or other audio experience.