Linux 6.8 Dropping Support For Very Old Graphics Drivers

A new drm-misc-next pull request was sent today to DRM-Next bringing a few notable changes for the upcoming Linux 6.8 merge window.

First up, today's pull removes the user-space mode-setting ioctls from the kernel. Kernel mode-setting (KMS) has long been preferred for many years now by the Linux desktop while the user-space mode-setting (UMS) interfaces have remained. Earlier this year in Linux 6.3 a number of old and unmaintained drivers were removed for obsolete graphics hardware. For Linux 6.8, the old UMS infrastructure is being removed to finally say good-bye to the old UMS world.

When it comes to new code in this week's drm-misc-next pull, the V3D driver adds support for CPU jobs. This Broadcom V3D driver work is focused on the Raspberry Pi single board computers to better handle Vulkan and being able to handle more work on the CPU side for where the Broadcom VideoCore graphics hardware isn't accommodating enough for Vulkan API needs.

New to Linux 6.8 in the DRM world is the Imagination PowerVR DRM driver. This week's pull has added a number of fixes to this newly-queued driver code.

More details on the other drm-misc-next feature changes for the week can be found via this pull request.