Re: Future desktop on dumb frame buffers?

On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 3:50 PM, Geert Uytterhoeven
[off-list ref] wrote:

On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 20:25, Jesse Barnes [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

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

quoted

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.

The three major GPU device classes on PC...

Sadly it gets worse.  A lot of the SoC vendors are adding an fbdev
emulation layer on top of v4l rather than using fbdev directly or
using KMS and v4l has grown it's own edid, hdmi, and cec handling.

Alex

quoted

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.

Can Wayland handle fbdev APIs ...

quoted

quoted

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)

... if no additional features of KMS are needed?

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

                        Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
                                -- Linus Torvalds
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