FBDEV Is Still (Barely) Alive Within The Linux Kernel
Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Kernel on 11 February 2015 at 07:34 AM EST. 6 Comments
LINUX KERNEL --
Back in 2012 there was a call for deprecating FBDEV within the Linux kernel considering that DRM and V4L2 drivers are much better options. Sadly there hasn't been any formal deprecation of FBDEV in the mainline kernel yet, but its still receiving a few changes each kernel cycle.

Since Laurent Pinchart's call for deprecating FBDEV, we've seen more hardware pick up Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) and Video 4 Linux 2 (V4L2), but the kernel fbdev drivers are still around and seeing a bit of work from time to time.

With Linux 3.20, there's just two changes for the fbdev feature pull.

The Linux frame-buffer drivers are still around since not everything has a DRM/V4L2 driver and not all software programs have abandoned their fbdev support, but hopefully over time we'll see this older Linux display technology be phased out more and more.
6 Comments
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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