Fedora 21 Will Try To Abandon Non-KMS GPU Drivers

There's hope that Fedora 21 will do away with non-KMS graphics drivers by default. A whole set of conventional (UMS) X.Org drivers are set to be retired in this first Fedora Linux release of 2014.

Red Hat's Adam Jackson is hoping to drop a whole set of X.Org DDX drivers such as Geode, Glint, i128, Mach64, MGA, r128, SiS, and Trident. Effectively he wants to get rid of the graphics drivers that don't have DRM/KMS support. The exceptions here would still be shipping the VESA X.Org driver for fallback scenarios and then also fbdev/modesetting DDX drivers for cases where there is a DRM/KMS driver but no hardware-specific X.Org driver.

Raised already on the mailing list was also concern about the Geode DDX driver being dropped since that's in use with Fedora by the original OLPC laptop. Of course, besides these in-tree drivers, users are expected to still be able to install the NVIDIA and AMD Catalyst binary drivers too if they wish.

This proposed Fedora 21 graphics driver change and the surrounding discussion can be found on the Fedora devel list.