The Virtual KMS Module Has Begun Progressing As Part Of GSoC 2018

In addition to the Vulkan Virgl project another one of the interesting projects for Google Summer of Code 2018 is the development of VKMS, a Virtual KMS DRM driver.

The focus of this VKMS module is to allow for setting a mode in order to run a display on X/Wayland with a headless machine, such as for testing and other purposes when not actually backed by a physical display. But this VKMS module would still allow the virtual output to be backed by a physical GPU. This GSoC 2018 project under the X.Org umbrella is being pursued by student Rodrigo Siqueira.

While GSoC 2018 is off to a very early start, there has been some VKMS progress this month already. Earlier in the month was introducing the basic driver and by basic, a very rudimentary kernel driver implementation with just the barebones. But since then it has begun to be filled in although at this point it's still far from being end-user functional.

It will certainly be interesting to see how far VKMS matures this summer and if it will end up on a trajectory for merging into the mainline Linux kernel. As it evolves, we'll certainly be covering it on Phoronix with it being one of the most exciting GSoC 2018 projects from our perspective.

For those wanting to track the progress on their own, there is the topic/vkms branch in drm-misc.