Virtual KMS Is Working On Wayland Support Plus Other Additions

The Virtual Kernel Mode-Setting (VKMS) driver may soon work with Wayland compositors and see other capabilities for this recently-merged DRM code.

VKMS is one of the best GSoC and Outreachy projects we've seen this year or in a while... They succeeded in their mission and got their code merged to the mainline kernel in a very punctual manner. The GSoC student developer also intends to continue working on VKMS, potentially with an internship grant from the Brazilian government.

The main use-case for VKMS is testing purposes with being able to use this driver on headless systems but the possibilities are really endless.

Rodrigo Siqueira (the GSoC participant) and Haneen Mohammed (the Outreachy participant) who spent the past several months working on VKMS presented at last week's XDC2018 conference in Spain. For those interested in learning more about this VKMS driver, their slide deck can be viewed here (PDF).

In that presentation they shared some of the future improvements for VKMS are getting Wayland to work on top of this code, fixing KMS page-flipping test failures, CRC improvements, and other features. Bounced around at XDC were also other ideas for possible future code improvements to this driver. It will certainly be great to see what happens with VKMS over the months ahead.