Projects I am currently working on

At SuSE we're part of the core team writing the radeonhd driver for ATI's newest graphics chips as a community effort. ATI is also providing free documentation for those chips.

While writing radeonhd we had to find out that the chips are programmed radically different from older chips. For understanding their 3D cores a bringup (testing) tool was necessary. I wrote most of the code for this together with Alex Deucher from AMD. We are able to understand most of the chip's behavior now.

I'm working on X.org for my employer, mainly on the Xserver, the RandR subsystem, the mousedriver, and on caching systems.

Xgl and compiz have mainly been created by David Reveman, I'm working a bit on it and package it for openSUSE when time permits. I've mostly done work for XVideo acceleration in Xgl.

pointcloud accelerates rendering of scattered point data by a hierarchical data structure based on a PCA clustering procedure. By traversing this structure for each frame we can trade-off rendering speed vs. image quality. The scheme also reduces memory consumption by using quantized relative coordinates and it allows for fast sorting of semi-transparent clusters.

I developed the original OpenGL output plugin, now actively maintained by the xine developer comunity. I also started the IRIX port, including irixal sound.

Tom's MoComp is one of the best available deinterlacer, I ported it to transcode.

fieldanalysis detects progressive / interlaced / telecined video automatically. This is mainly for use in scripts.

machtest is a thorough benchmark for graphics cards. Not a fancy one, though. It is completely configurable and can give you performance numbers for almost every single aspect of OpenGL systems. Additionally, the results can be visualized for comparison, as it is done in the results section.

runsuid runs a script with another user-id/group-id, when the user has the right to do so according to the configuration file. If used in the right combination with access restrictions this can ease the life of system administrators. Additionally, it can be used for running CGI-scripts as different fixed users.

view is a CGI binary that uses external programms to view and extract archive contents. One can browse through archives just like they were ordinary directories. Additionally, for several data types converters to html exist, which e.g. transform Amiga Guide files on the fly to readable html code. view superseeds lhad.

lsearch is a full text search engine that is used on www.ftp.uni-erlangen.de. It is capable of finding >30000 hits in a 150MB database in less than 0.1 seconds on a Sun Ultra-2 (once, parts of the database have been paged in). Sorting, however, needs some more time ;-) . The database itself is built in less than one hour.

sgrid is a framework for visualizing sparse grids, which provide very efficient means for compressing huge 3D data sets.