FBDEV Drivers See More Fixes With Linux 5.18

It's been a decade since the calls began for deprecating Linux's frame-buffer drivers "FBDEV" and the push for replacing FBDEV with DRM/KMS drivers. While DRM/KMS drivers are now commonplace even in the embedded space, FBDEV still won't die and with Linux 5.18 is seeing another round of fixes going in.

FBDEV was fading out and lacking a maintainer to oversee the code in the Linux kernel until at the beginning of this year when a developer stepped up wanting to maintain FBDEV and now we've been seeing more fixes head into this subsystem.

The new FBDEV maintainer, Helge Deller, sent in the FBDEV pull request for the Linux 5.18 cycle, which amounts to just more driver fixes.

Lots of small fixes and code cleanups across most of the fbdev drivers.

This includes conversions to use helper functions, const conversions, spelling fixes, help text updates, adding return value checks, small build fixes, and much more.

Aside from all the mostly mundane driver fixes, outside of that and coming in by way of the DRM tree is also some significant performance optimizations for some FBDEV operations that is also landing for Linux 5.18.