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[request] Generic KMS driver (a la SimpleDRM)

Open jbeich opened this issue 2 years ago • 3 comments

Required for Wayland for unsupported GPUs with software rendering. Xorg has xf86-video-vesa, xf86-video-scfb, etc. but Wayland standardized on KMS. To overcome this Linux added simpledrm driver to bridge various framebuffer drivers.

See also (fbdev uAPI is similar to syscons/vt): https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/11e8f5fd223b https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots/pull/2410 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/weston/-/merge_requests/812 https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/merge_requests/1906

jbeich avatar Dec 01 '23 13:12 jbeich

That would be very, very useful as currently there is no way to use Wayland e.g. in VMs.

hny-gd avatar Dec 03 '23 09:12 hny-gd

I thought such thing already exists and is called either swrast or llvmpipe?

arrowd avatar Jan 31 '24 15:01 arrowd

I thought such thing already exists and is called either swrast or llvmpipe?

Not the same thing, swrast is a software renderer. SimpleDRM creates a drm device (/dev/dri/card0) but no drm render device. So you still have software accel (and so need swrast/llvmpipe) but can talk with KMS to the driver meaning wayland software will work.

evadot avatar Jan 31 '24 17:01 evadot