VKMS Driver Getting Cursor Support In The Next Kernel Cycle

One of the notable additions to the Linux 4.19 kernel is the initial VKMS driver for "virtual kernel mode-setting" that in the long run should be significant for headless Wayland/X.Org systems. The driver is still in its early stages but continuing to be improved.

The VKMS DRM driver came around this summer thanks to GSoC and Outreachy students working on this virtual KMS driver. The driver isn't feature complete yet, but Haneen Mohammed of Outreachy has landed some more of her patches that will come during the next kernel merge window.

Sent in on Thursday was the latest drm-misc-next pull request of various Direct Rendering Manager updates. There isn't much that stands out overall in this drm-misc-next update, but there are the latest VKMS patches.

Coming with this pull is initial cursor plane support. The cursor support isn't yet fully vetted so for now requires the vkms.enable_cursor=1 module parameter to activate.

Haneen also wrote a blog post this week about DRM CRC API support for VKMS.