VKMS Coming In Linux 4.19 Is One Of The Best GSoC & Outreachy Projects Of The Year

One of the student summer coding projects that ended up being a cross between Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and Outreachy was the VKMS driver to provide a virtual KMS implementation for headless systems and other interesting use-cases.

Rodrigo Siqueira applied to GSoC 2018 to work on the long talked about "VKMS" driver while separately Haneen Mohammed had applied to Outreachy with a similar goal. Given the overlap, they worked together to get the Virtual KMS driver working. These summer student coding projects are drawing to a close and this initial driver is being sent sent into Linux 4.19 via the DRM tree. Not bad considering most GSoC/Outreachy projects introducing new code don't make it mainline so quickly, if ever.

Rodrigo Siqueira has also expressed his desire to stick around the Linux DRM community and intends to further flesh out more features for the VKMS driver. He is also being evaluated for a grant to pursue his DRM/VKMS work for several months from the Brazilian government. Among the work still being pursued is getting VKMS working without vblanks, among other missing items.

There's a final end-of-GSoC2018 recap on his blog for those interested in the potential use of this VKMS driver in the future for headless X.Org/Wayland systems, etc.