Future desktop on dumb frame buffers?

[Geert Uytterhoeven]

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...

> 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 ...

>> 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 at 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