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  • Hacker News
  • Why is DRM being implemented in the Kernel; What is the profile for an end-user who wants this in their FOSS?
  • Different DRM, the one in the kernel is Direct Rendering Manager, which is basically managing access to the GPU.
  • DRM refers to Direct Rendering Manager in this context.
  • The Direct Rendering Manager is useful for any Linux user who wants to display things on a monitor (unless you're happy with like 640x480 VESA, in which case maybe you don't need it)
  • This is DRM as in Direct Rendering Manager, which is the kernel interface to GPU hardware; not Digital Rights Management.
  • Here it doesn’t mean “digital rights management”, but “Direct Rendering Manager”, a component of the kernel’s graphics stack: https://docs.kernel.org/gpu/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
  • People who want to play video games, or watch videos using hardware decoding, or train machine learning models? DRM here means https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Rendering_Manager

    > DRM exposes an API that user-space programs can use to send commands and data to the GPU and perform operations such as configuring the mode setting of the display.

    > User-space programs can use the DRM API to command the GPU to do hardware-accelerated 3D rendering and video decoding, as well as GPGPU computing.

  • Linux is so very predictably stable from a desktop user perspective . It is an absolute pleasure to use , particularly when combined with TUI applications like yazi, lsd, fzf , neovim etc

    Been using it since the early nineties .

    At work I use Windows Server 2025 as my desktop ( the alternative would be the dreadful AI infested Windows 11).

    While Windows Server 2025 is not dreadful , the Linux experience is so much nicer .

  • What about this is more interesting than the LWN coverage?
  • I clicked this one with no hype. I am now exited to update the kernel of my raspberry pi 4.
  • Okay, so ELI 5 why I would now use HDMI instead of DP?

    All my monitors support DP, my GPU has more ports for DP ...

    I am genuinely interested as I've never even considered using HDMI for my Desktop.

  • Which part of "because the device doesn't have a DP port" is not enough for you?

    You can't picture such devices or what's the holdup?

  • Because your motherboard only supports HDMI. The last three I used had HDMI, and sometimes VGA.
  • HDMI 2.1 carries more bandwidth than DisplayPort 1.4. Plenty of GPU/monitors have that port arrangement, as recent as Nvidia's RTX 40 Series.
  • I have been using HDMI to game on TV for most or all of my adult life. Mostly console gaming. A few years back I built a dedicated gaming rig, but I still use it with a controller from my couch connected to a TV.

    So this is a win for couch gamers and open source in general.

  • > Okay, so ELI 5 why I would now use HDMI instead of DP?

    For A/V stuff: CEC and (e)ARC.

    * CEC: control one device, and downstream items receive instructions so you're (ideally) not fiddling with multiple remotes.

    * ARC: the TV/display can decode audio/video and pass the audio to a sound bar or other audio system.

  • HDMI is a king on consumer TVs. Linux (in form of SteamOS) is becoming a major console gaming platform thanks to Valve.
  • > Okay, so ELI 5 why I would now use HDMI instead of DP?

    I use DP too when I can. For example my main desktop is using DP.

    But many devices have HDMI, not DP. For example I've got seven Raspberry Pi here: they all have HDMI and none has DP. There's, what, 100 million Raspberry Pi in the world by now? Don't know the number but: devices that do not support DP aren't rare.

    And Linux runs on much more than desktop PCs.

  • If you’re using a TV. They rarely have DP ports.
  • Who is the main audience for this type of content? Genuinely curious because I am not a serious Linux user.

    What type of info do you get out of this for those who read this? So i can glance your insight?

  • I look for wake from sleep fixes, nvidia the primary offender there (they have at least two bugs affecting it across several driver versions). But my intel wifi driver (BE200) also has an apparent hard lock on wake. Looks like this particular release doesn't have any fixes for me, though claude says its not the full change list.
  • hi audience, we know about this stuff you use on a daily basis, you may be interested in our executive summary of the latest release of the stuff
  • I'd say mostly sys admins type users that want to stay on top of things?

    I install Linux on a wide variety of hardware for both work and personal reasons.

    I don't read the detailed changelogs religiously but after years of paying some attention to them I can understand most of it and see where the industry is investing developer efforts, what cool new hardware is gaining support and what new security or performance features people are focusing on.

  • I'm using a recently released laptop, and Linux hardware support hasn't caught up yet. So I've been following the changelogs of recent kernel releases to understand the current state of support.
  • > Who is the main audience for this type of content?

    I make technology decisions at a large embedded shop that makes cars.

    Content like this tells me Igalia has serious programmers and is relevant upstream. The memory sticks.

    It's also informative, which makes me feel good.

    They're a consultancy. It's good for business.

  • I think it is mostly "marketing" for Igalia's services. If you want to pay people to do "stuff" in Linux and adjacent projects like Mesa, Igalia seems very competent.
  • It's a well-formatted changelog of the most salient features of the release. Linus doesn't provide one apart from a list of added commits and merged branches, which isn't very useful unless you are a kernel developer.
    by sph
  • As a long time desktop and server user, why do I look at changelogs...

    New filesystems and major changes to existing ones (large performance improvements, new features like adding better compression standards which I now know I can use, fixes to long-standing bugs which open new use cases).

    New protocols like wireguard when it was new and exciting (still is now that I think of it). When that was mainlined, I knew I had some network rearchitecting to do.

    New device drivers like amdgpu when it was massive news. Less so these days since most hardware is well supported, and I don't buy the absolute latest.

    New kernel APIs which I can use in my programs — like landlock, when it was merged I knew it was time to improve sandboxing in some of my stuff.

    Though LWN and kernel newbies do it best, already linked by others.

  • I just want them to make memory management sane. Is that too much to ask? OOM shouldn't cause a hard reboot.

    Ok actually I "solved" this by upgrading to 128GB of RAM (before the rampocalypse), but still they should fix it.

  • ... look into earlyoom , its a pretty neat solution just prescribe to it, all the stuff to never oom no matter what I've never had to hard reboot anymore due to OOM

    After setting up earlyoom to gracefully start shutting stuff down at a threshold before hitting oom, robustly works all the time even under intense ram + swap pressure + 100% cpu on all cores sorta workload

    https://man.archlinux.org/man/earlyoom.1.en