Re: Future desktop on dumb frame buffers?

[Jesse Barnes <jbarnes@virtuousgeek.org>]

On Mon, 21 Mar 2011 19:19:43 +0000
timofonic timofonic <timofonic@gmail.com> wrote:
> So if KMS is so cool and provides many advantages over fbdev and
> such... Why isn't more widely used intead of still relying on fbdev?
> Why still using fbdev emulation (that is partial and somewhat broken,
> it seems) instead using KMS directly?

Used by what?  All three major GPU device classes have KMS support
(Intel, ATI, and nVidia).  If you want it for a particular device, you
can always port it over.

As for fbdev emulation, what's still using it?  There's nothing
stopping projects from converting over; X and Wayland can already
handle KMS APIs just fine.

> I know the graphic driver situation is quite bad on Linux, especially
> on the embedded world. Fbdev seems is still quite used there by binary
> blob drivers.

Probably for a couple of reasons:
  1) inertia: fbdev has been around a lot longer, and provides most of
  what embedded devices need anyway
  2) feature set: why bother doing a full KMS driver if you're not
  going to use any of the additional features it would provide (output
  management, memory management, execution management)

Jesse