On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 20:25, Jesse Barnes jbarnes@virtuousgeek.org wrote:
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.
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@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