Re: Future desktop on dumb frame buffers?

On Mon, 21 Mar 2011 19:19:43 +0000
timofonic timofonic [off-list ref] 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