3 ms·
I remember KMS becoming a thing and wondering why anyone needed or wanted this. I still don't exactly know, since it seemed natural to me that the kernel should
by boondaburrah 4y ago
I remember KMS becoming a thing and wondering why anyone needed or wanted this. I still don't exactly know, since it seemed natural to me that the kernel shouldn't be doing any graphics things until I actually wanted a graphical console. I suppose this is more of a microkernel view of things, since similarly you could argue that the kernel doesn't need to know about disks and filesystems, only programs that need to access pesky files need to do that.
- dathinab 4y agoThe kernel not setting the mode basically means no console _at all_, boot log, and similar for you on modern hardware ;=) (or relying one some very very old hacks which might or might not work with your graphic card/screen). Basically the kernel needs KMS because it want to log things in a readable way during boot etc. And sure you could argue it's not the kernel doing the logging but e.g. systemd, but it's also not the kernel doing the graphics but your graphics driver. It's just the kernel coordinating it.
- boondaburrah 4y agoI mean, the BIOS sets up a perfectly usable text console back in the day when they were adding KMS, and even now UEFI will run one at the native resolution of my laptop, so you can get by without it.