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.