
David explains the one thousand line DRM driver as, "The SimpleDRM driver binds to simple-framebuffer devices and provides a DRM/KMS API. It provides only a single RTC+encoder+connector combination plus one initial mode. Userspace can create one dumb-buffer and attach it to the CRTC. Only if the buffer is destroyed, a new buffer can be created. The buffer is directly mapped into user-space, so we have only resources for a single buffer. Otherwise, shadow buffers plus damage-request would be needed."
This SimpleDRM driver has fbdev fallback support and this new code seeks to replace vesafb, efifb, simplefb, and vgafb as simple frame-buffer drivers for the Linux kernel. All that's required to use this DRM driver on new kernels for hardware not supported by other DRM drivers would be to enable CONFIG_X86_SYSFB.
The driver patch-set is up to its fourth revision and is still seeking reviews, you can join in on the discussion via the dri-devel mailing list. This would be another one of many great features for Linux 3.12.
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