Future desktop on dumb frame buffers?

[Jesse Barnes]

On Mon, 21 Mar 2011 20:50:20 +0100
Geert Uytterhoeven <geert at linux-m68k.org> wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 20:25, Jesse Barnes <jbarnes at virtuousgeek.org> wrote:
> > On Mon, 21 Mar 2011 19:19:43 +0000
> > timofonic timofonic <timofonic at 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.
> 
> The three major GPU device classes on PC...

Yes, good point. :)

> > 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 ...

Yes.  Fundamentally, the Wayland protocol just assumes a way to share
buffers between processes.  For the software raster version of the Qt
port, Kristian created a shmem interface for doing that to allow the
results of CPU rendering to be passed around without copying.  On an
embedded device that would be one way to go.

-- 
Jesse Barnes, Intel Open Source Technology Center