NVIDIA's Proprietary Driver Is Moving Closer With Kernel Mode-Setting

NVIDIA has been working out plans for their graphics driver to support Mir and Wayland. As part of that, besides their recent EGL support, they've been tackling kernel mode-setting.

Within this week's NVIDIA 352.09 beta Linux graphics driver release there's more underlying changes in working towards their support goals for Linux outside of X11. As pointed out by this blog post of a Fedora contributor, there's work on a new nvidia-modeset kernel module with the new 352 Linux driver series.

Within code for the new NVIDIA 352 Linux driver series are references to the new nvidia-modeset.ko kernel module that in turn talks with the original nvidia.ko kernel driver. This 352.09 driver release doesn't ship with proper KMS support, but hopefully this is another sign that their work is culminating quite soon.