No one wants window management in the kernel, so yeah, the assumption is that there is one master that decides what buffer(s) are scanned out. That said, DRM is

No one wants window management in the kernel, so yeah, the assumption is that there is one master that decides what buffer(s) are scanned out. That said, DRM is the only way to use the hardware compositors found on many mobile chips, which allow you to rotate, resize and blend together multiple buffers on the fly to produce the final display. A minimal DRM example isn't much more, by the way: https://github.com/yuq/gfx/blob/master/drm/main.c https://github.com/yuq/gfx/blob/master/drm/main.c And this does a lot more stuff that you want, like what connectors (think HDMI or LVDS internally) does my hardware have, which of those have displays connected, what modes are supported by those displays, and it can be very easily extended to do 3D rendering. Beyond the HW planes, there is lots of stuff DRM enables that you simply can't do with /dev/fb but absolutely want, like true VSync synchronized rendering.