14 ms·
Fedora 36: A brave new (DRM/KMS only) world
- cabirum 4y agoDRM = Direct Rendering Manager
- allenbina 4y agoYou would think they would be more aware of very commonly used acronyms, especially those with a negative connotation.
- kzrdude 4y agoDRM has been used by Direct Rendering Manager for 15 years or so, so it's itself a commonly used acronym.
- gm3dmo 4y agoDigital Rights Management (DRM) is what sprang to my mind.
- notreallyserio 4y agoMe too, and KMS is key management system or software. But I'm more in the devops side of the industry.
- chipotle_coyote 4y agoI don't doubt it, but it was still a little frustrating -- as far as I can tell, DRM is never defined in the documentation on kernel.org. (I just doublechecked that by searching for "direct rendering" and nothing like "DRM (Direct Rendering Manager)" comes up.) I could tell from context that this didn't mean "digital rights management," but as someone who is not a GPU developer, I didn't have the context to figure it out. So, I really think they should take a few extra words and put this in either the introduction to the GPU Driver Developer's Guide or the first page in the section entitled "DRM Internals". They do that for KMS!
- btdmaster 4y agoThere used to be some documentation that explicitly mentioned it by name, but it has since been removed: https://archive.ph/20140226185421/https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/README.drm https://archive.ph/20140226185421/https://git.kernel.org/cgi...
- arka2147483647 4y agoNo. If you are not in-the-know of linux trivia, this will be highly arcane to you.
- kzrdude 4y agoIt's not linux trivia - it's information anyone trying to get graphics drivers to work or looking for updates on linux might have come across.
- robonerd 4y ago'KMS' (kernel mode setting) probably disambiguates 'DRM' for most of those who are familiar with desktop Linux.
- thenewwazoo 4y agoI read it as “key management system” i.e. TPM, and was confused too.
- amaranth 4y agoDirect Rendering Manager has been a part of the kernel since 1999, before the 2.4 release. At that time the term Digital Rights Management as a catch-all for CSS, dongles, etc wasn't widespread.
- tremon 4y agoTo keep with the theme of the thread: CSS = Content Scramble System, nothing to do with cascading style sheets.
- pfortuny 4y agoThis is important, thanks. I "understood" (mis) the post thinking that somehow, Fedora would now only use Digital Rights Managed displays (with a hack to make all non-DRM displays into one)... :~/
- DoctorOW 4y agoTo be fair Digital Rights Management displays are a real thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content_Protection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content...
- pfortuny 4y agoOf course, that is why I was confused. Also the title of the post is either confusing or a kind of play on words.
- em-bee 4y agoespecially with the dystopian "brave new world" reference
- ucm_edge 4y agoDefinitely. Brave New World immediately sent my mind to think "Digital Rights Management" and "Key Management Server" had come to Fedora in a new dystopian way.
- userbinator 4y agoThose familiar with Windows will certainly think of "DRM/KMS" in that way since that's what those acronyms mean there.
- stjohnswarts 4y agoI was definitely trying to connect this in my brain with some weird logic after just skimming the article.
- wubbert 4y agoHow will this change affect the users of Fedora?
- wmf 4y agoIt won't.
- robonerd 4y agoMost have been using DRM/KMS for years now, so there won't be any noticeable change for them.
- rwmj 4y agoThere are some relatively ancient graphics cards supported by fbdev with no KMS driver. They may need to use the simple framebuffer-only support (simpledrm). I believe almost no users will be affected by this.
- dfox 4y agosimpledrm expects somewhat sane framebuffer memory layout which many of the ancient cards cannot provide so even that probably is not a solution. But the problem is non-existent because in PC context these cards are ISA cards made well before 1995.
- skozharinov 4y agoFedora is a bleeding edge distro, I thibk it's okay to disable legacy stuff there.
- Buttons840 4y agoAs a Fedora user, I find it more polished than Ubuntu, Debian, and Mint (the other distros I've used). Newcomers shouldn't be dissuaded by this "bleeding edge" description.
- bproven 4y agoi agree - I have been using it for years and found it much better than Ubuntu in general
- stjohnswarts 4y agoI just don't want to upgrade every 6 months is all. I stick to popos/ubuntu LTS for daily drivers and arch when I want to be cutting edge. Fedora is in some strange middle ground to me.
- rplnt 4y agoWhat I found working (although I haven't been using fedora for quite a few years now) is to skip a release if possible. Only when it seemed the N+2 is still too broken I upgraded to N+1.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y agoA lot of people live a release behind latest going by: https://retrace.fedoraproject.org/faf/summary/ https://retrace.fedoraproject.org/faf/summary/
- hypothesis 4y agoI think Fedora release is officially supported for 13 months, which allows one to upgrade every other release, or be a release behind at all times, if desired. They seem to do go a good job updating major components for latest-1 release: kernel, Firefox, etc. However, I noticed that say Chromium updates are not as fast or at latest version. So using Fedora that way might not be best choice.
- akoster 4y agoA complete side tangent: How does one prevent pingbacks from content-less "blogs" (which seem to be optimizing for clicks)? (I see 3 pingbacks from lzomedia.com, makemoneyonlinecom.com and imoneyhub.com at the above link)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- throwaway81523 4y agoThat would be up to the blog operator, I'd expect. I've never seen any value to even legitimate pingbacks, so if I used a blog that had them, I'd disable them altogether.
- robonerd 4y agoUse umatrix in whitelist mode. By default, I only load first party html, images, and CSS.
- TheChaplain 4y agoIsn't umatrix deprecated?
- robonerd 4y agoStill works.
- amenod 4y agoUnfortunately, yes. But it still works and rocks. uBlock Origin has kind-of-similar (but not quite) functionality where you can block by domains, but it is not as granular (it is called "Advanced" something IIRC).
- Arnavion 4y agoIt is equally granular. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26284124 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26284124
- jancsika 4y agoIs KMS the KMS from "dtoverlay=vc4-kms-v3d" in the rpi400's boot/config.txt? If so: Dear video gods, A fickle wizard told me I could fix studdering Chromium playback on HBO Max for my RPI400 by reciting the following incantation: "remove the letter f from the line `dtoverlay=vc4-fkms-v3d`" I did as instructed. But now the wizard's spell has caused my mouse pointer to become drowsy-- it lags when I drag it in the Chromium window. Please help me! Also, if you could explain to a mere mortal what the hell that setting is, I would be grateful. Also if you could explain why the "Direct Rendering Display Compositor" for Chromium is inescapably Disabled no matter what flags I set, I'd be grateful. It seems like that affects the efficiency of subtitle display, but I'm just guessing here. (Using Raspbian Buster on the Rpi400.) In your honor I offer this ASCII goat: (_( /_/'_____/) " | | |""""""|
- zaarn 4y agoKMS only means Kernel Mode Setting, it's a way for the kernel to handle display resolutions so it can set the proper resolution for a display during bootup and enables instant TTY switching. DRM is the direct rendering manager, it's mainly an interface for applications like X11 to talk to the GPU directly (ie 3D Acceleration and Video Decoding). If KMS is causing things to be slow, it might be because the video driver is not working and the software framebuffer is being used. At higher resolutions that'll be slow. If Chrome doesn't have the option to enable DRDC then the driver used likely doesn't support DRM or the window manager is not passing it properly.
- jancsika 4y ago> If KMS is causing things to be slow, it might be because the video driver is not working and the software framebuffer is being used. At higher resolutions that'll be slow. But then how could using a software framebuffer on an underpowered thing like the RPI400 cause the video to play smoothly?
- snvzz 4y ago>an underpowered thing I would not call Raspberry Pi 400 underpowered. The Cortex-A72 cores are fairly fast.
- olliej 4y agoI was super confused and worried by DRM here, which I guess goes to show how long it’s been since getting video working on linux required futzing with manual kernel builds :D
- stjohnswarts 4y agoI actually had some hope that this would be a fix for the low resolutions for DRM in firefox, et al.
- ILMostro7 4y agoThis actually highlights a great, albeit belated, piece of work. In the end, this cleans up some legacy code and it helps to unify the framebuffer display across vendors AND (some) architectures.
- shmerl 4y agoWhat prevents Linux kernel featured terminal (tty) from supporting true color and other fancy terminal features?
- throwaway82652 4y agoNothing, things like this have existed for a while: https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/kmscon/ https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/kmscon/ https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/KMSCON https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/KMSCON
- shmerl 4y agoHmm: > Development of Kmscon stopped in March 2015. There was a successor project called systemd-consoled, but this project was also later dropped in July 2015. That doesn't sound very promising. Why can't kernel itself ship a more advanced terminal?
- di4na 4y agoBecause noone is paid to do it.
- goldorak 4y agoThat's obviously not the reason, there is a lot of good stuff done by volunteers, it's niche and not enough ppl care about it.
- throwaway82652 4y ago>Why can't kernel itself ship a more advanced terminal? Probably because nobody wants to put opentype font rendering and input method support and various other things from a window system into the kernel? This stuff all has to be in userspace so you're better off just running a minimal X or Wayland server at that point.
- shmerl 4y ago
- AreYouSirius 4y ago
- mise_en_place 4y agoThis sounds fine on paper, but I’d be nervous completely removing fb. Many times I’ve had to fall back to that when my nvidia drivers weren’t updated by dkms. Not having fb loaded and no nvidia-drm kernel module for the new kernel typically either hangs the system or you get a black screen and have to SSH in to fix it
- amluto 4y agoI would hope the simpledrm can do this too. It certainly ought to work, especially on UEFI systems.
- fmakunbound 4y agoDoes this mean less display flickering during Linux boot while the system tries to figure out what mode to use?
- wmf 4y agoThat was solved a few years ago: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Fedora-30-More-Flicker-Free https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Fedora-3...
- majewsky 4y agoWell yeah, that's KMS. The flickering was when Xorg and fbdev did separate modesetting, so every time you switched from terminal to Xorg and back, one had to reset the screens into the default mode and the other had to then set the desired mode.
- zh3 4y agoFortunately we moved off Fedora some time ago, for exactly this sort of reason - when you're working with industrial stuff where minimum timescale is a decade and reliability is a must, low-tech FB interfaces are de rigeur. Once upon a time, breaking userspace was a no-no [0]. [0] https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75 https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75
- deadbunny 4y agoWhy were you using a distro with a 9 month lifespan for 10+ year deployments?
- hypothesis 4y agoI think Fedora is supported for ~13 month [0]. At least I have no issues updating every other release once a year. [0] https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/releases/ https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/releases/
- deadbunny 4y agoI stand corrected, but the question doesn't change.
- djur 4y agoI don't think Linus would agree that "don't break userspace" applies to distributions choosing how to configure the Linux kernel. That's why the configuration options exist in the first place.
- dralley 4y agoThis is a weird comment. Fedora is absolutely not intended for "industrial stuff where minimum timescale is a decade and reliability is a must" and if you were using it for that and had issues, it's kind of your own fault. This reads like a criticism of Fedora when it's not really deserved.
- zh3 4y ago
- noobermin 4y agoI guess I realized, on my gentoo machine, it had been years since I had to care about which fb option i set in the kernel, drm/kms only always worked.
- computerdork 4y agoNo idea what is causing any of these video issues, but the ASCII goat by the OP is a nice gesture. Hail the gods for they are benevolent and wise!
- phendrenad2 4y agoCutting through the linux kernel jargon, this is just deprecating one API for writing to the framebuffer (/dev/fb0 etc), since there is another way: using the standardized KMS API.
- tlamponi 4y agoWe, that is Proxmox VE (Linux based clustering & hyper-visor distro) and our other projects, had to roll back that exact change due to issues on some test HW a few months back, but it has to be said that we're on the 5.15 LTS while Fedora will use 5.17, so it may just be that there are a few fixes/improvements missing. For us, it wasn't worth the deeper investigation, so we went to just ensure simplefb (same spirit w.r.t. taking over the firmware frame buffer, but no DRM) is activated for now. Albeit, on one machine we could also get simpledrm to work after a BIOS update, so I'm definitively interested in how that plays out with Fedora. In any way, it's definitively a welcomed change, so if it plays out well for them, I'll try to switch again with our next Kernel jump.