Microsoft Posts Initial DRM Driver For Hyper-V Synthetic Video Device

Microsoft has posted their initial patch implementing a Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver for the synthetic video device exposed by their Hyper-V virtualization stack.

This "hyperv_drm" driver is a very primitive Microsoft Hyper-V DRM driver to say the least. This DRM driver is a port of their existing HyperV Linux frame-buffer (hyperv_fb) driver while more advanced features available within the DRM subsystem are not yet wired in.

This Hyper-V DRM driver can already be used with Microsoft Hyper-V today for display support and running the likes of GNOME and Wayland's Weston, but still has a ways to go. Microsoft's Deepak Rawat acknowledged that features like hardware cursors, EDID, multiple dirty region tracking, and other features are not supported at the moment. Future iterations of the driver are expected to add those features.

"For testing, ran GNOME and Weston with current changes in a Linux VM on Windows 10 with hyper-v enabled," ended the mailing list post presenting this Microsoft DRM driver.

Besides assisting those using Hyper-V virtualization itself in offering a better display driver than a Linux FB driver, this new hyperv_drm driver might also play a role in supporting GUI applications on WSL2 and their development of a Wayland compositor as part of that effort as well.

We'll see how this Microsoft DRM driver pans out and how quickly it will be accepted to mainline as well as how long it will take until the driver is more feature complete.