On Monday 21 March 2011 20:34:38 Corbin Simpson wrote: > On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 12:25 PM, Jesse Barnes <jbarnes@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > On Mon, 21 Mar 2011 19:19:43 +0000 > > > > timofonic timofonic <timofonic@xxxxxxxxx> 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) > > Related: We are still missing basic userspace tools (kmsset, e.g.), > some kind of direct KMS console (kmscon would work, if it existed), > and an xf86-video-modesetting which compiles and works (this is > actually possible now, with some patches that landed in 2.6.38 for > generic KMS access.) This looks interesting. If existing *fb drivers could be easily converted to KMS (including 2D acceleration) and then used in X with a common driver, it would be great. Let's say, convert cyber2000fb driver to KMS and use it in X with 2D acceleration. > This is important to me, as the various old drivers I've been hacking > on won't be accepted upstream without some sort of userspace which can > work with them. One of the big goals of KMS was a generic > userspace-facing API, like FB, but without the suck. -- Ondrej Zary _______________________________________________ dri-devel mailing list dri-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dri-devel
