Re: [Qemu-devel] GSoC projects about AHCI and S3 Trio

[Alexander Graf]

Hi Roland,


On 30.03.2010, at 01:52, Roland Elek wrote:

> Dear Qemu developers,
> 
> I am a university student from Hungary interested in contributing to Qemu 
> through Google Summer of Code.
> I am interested in emulation, and two projects from the ideas page in 
> particular. One of them is AHCI emulation.
> Can I kindly ask you what were the hardest points that made the project get a 
> high difficulty rating, so that I
> could determine whether to apply for it or not? At a first glance, I think 
> that AHCI code from VirtualBox OSE
> would be a good place to start. What do you think?

I looked at the AHCI code from vbox some time ago and deemed it unreadable. 
It's probably easier to go with the spec and implement it from there.

Nevertheless, if you're good at reading C++ that code might come in handy. Just 
don't expect to be able to take any of it over to Qemu :-). Coding styles 
between the two projects differ a lot.

The hard part is that it's a reasonably complex piece of hardware that needs to 
be emulated. The "high" ranking was basically to show people that we need 
someone with serious skills and eagerness to work on it :-). If you're a quick 
learner the skills part shouldn't be too hard. The eagerness and ambition part 
is the really important one.

> A quick search through the mailing list archives showed that the other topic, 
> the S3 Trio, has been around for
> some time now. DOSBox has support for it, and is open source, so I think we 
> could build upon that.

Yep. On IRC there's also someone called "jai" who wanted to look into that as 
well. Mind to coordinate with him?


Alex