roenxi

I don't have anything to say technically, but this ignores the social elephant in the room which is the interesting part of this story. We wound up with KMS because circa '07 AMD bought ATI and started to execute an Open Source strategy. That meant 2/3 of the big graphics providers were open source friendly (ATI/AMD & Intel) vs one closed (Nvidia).

That was when the bell tolled for X11 (yes, yes, is still tolling), as there was enough OS support to kill of UMS which was really just a mechanism to keep binary drivers a safe distance from the kernel. With key components open sourced, the Linux graphics stack has been reorganising like some sort of enormous mudslide with ripples and aftershocks that keep flowing out today 15 years later. KMS was one part of that.

At some point Nvidia, the last interesting closed source holdout & throwback to a bygone era, will cave and open source their damn driver and we can close the book on one of the most interesting episodes in the history of the open source movement.

formerly_proven
> At some point Nvidia, the last interesting closed source holdout & throwback to a bygone era, will cave and open source their damn driver and we can close the book on one of the most interesting episodes in the history of the open source movement.

Indeed, nVidia open sourced the kernel portion of their drivers a few weeks ago.

https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules

This is, at least for now, a somewhat limited release (only supports Turing and newer, only really tested for Tesla etc., which shows where the paint point is), and not mainlined (yet? Probably the long-term goal).