Linux's New DRM Panic "Blue Screen of Death" In Action
Linux's New DRM Panic "Blue Screen of Death" In Action
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What's DRM in this context? Surely linux kernel doesn't do digital rights management?
Direct Rendering Manager. Part of Linux kernel to communicate with GPUs.
Direct Rendering Manager
DRM came before DRM
Doesn't matter; I still get triggered by it every time anyway.
Actually there is DRM in the kernel thanks to the HDMI blobs.
Fuck HDMI. The committee makes doing custom hardware near impossible unless you're a mega corp
It was made by Hollywood for Hollywood.
How do they handle the naming confusion?
It ought to be mandatory to write this out whenever talking about Linux. I've seen more than one person bash Linux in a public forum "because it has digital rights management built into the kernel" after they've misinterpreted some news headline.
AIUI, the "Direct Rendering Manager" is responsible for the display change when you press ctrl-alt-Fn#. Once upon a time, Xfree86 or svgalib would directly poke registers in the video card. If a program crashed with the video card in a weird state, you're pretty much stuck with that until you do a blind reboot. The kernel had very little idea about what was going on with the video card.
Under DRM, the kernel now knows about the video card's state. The kernel handles resolution or dotclocks or whatever, and hands out mmaps of framebuffers and command buffers to programs. I think. The kernel is supposed to gatekeep any commands that may put the display into a deranged, all-you-can-do-now-is-power-it-down state.