The Linux Kernel Is Now Left Without An Official FBDEV Maintainer

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The Linux Kernel Is Now Left Without An Official FBDEV Maintainer

FBDEV has been slowly fading away for a number of years with DRM drivers becoming more friendly towards embedded use-cases and more. FBDEV hasn't fully died off yet, but as of Linux 4.10 it's now without a maintainer...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-4.10-Drops-FBDEV-Maintain

[timofonic]

Please kill that zombie before it revives again. And please make the kmskon a reality with a common library, it can be part of kmscon or Weston's terminal.c.

[swoorup]

Is fbdev the module which is loaded before the drm driver is loaded?

[zxy_thf]

Is fbdev the module which is loaded before the drm driver is loaded?

Yes (at least for my system)
[ 0.822365] efifb: probing for efifb
....
[ 1.488777] [drm] Initialized drm 1.1.0 20060810

Moreover, fbdev is usually built into the kernel, while drm is built as a module.

[RealNC]

I wonder what NVidia will do about this. Text-mode is not supported on modern machines (UEFI only supports graphics mode) and the nvidia drivers don't provide a console through DRM or KMS...

[cj.wijtmans]

I wonder what NVidia will do about this. Text-mode is not supported on modern machines (UEFI only supports graphics mode) and the nvidia drivers don't provide a console through DRM or KMS...

Is this why my TTYs are empty?

[Sunderland93]

I wonder what NVidia will do about this. Text-mode is not supported on modern machines (UEFI only supports graphics mode) and the nvidia drivers don't provide a console through DRM or KMS...

Only for FBDEV. Nvidia supports evifb

[RealNC]

Is this why my TTYs are empty?

Yes. You need a framebuffer console for UEFI. Text mode doesn't work there.

[RealNC]

Only for FBDEV. Nvidia supports evifb

Isn't efifb part of fbdev?

linux/drivers/video/fbdev/efifb.c

[cj.wijtmans]

efifb and fbdev seems to have disappeared.. i only have the emulation option.. in 4.8.13