One of the NVIDIA presentations at the recent XDC2025 developer conference was not around the NVIDIA driver itself but the ongoing fragmentation that’s happening within the Linux Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem and arguing the need for unifying more driver-side APIs for supporting different Linux DRM clinets.
Rahul Rameshbabu of NVIDIA’s Linux graphics driver team pointed out that there are 57 DRM drivers within the Linux kernel supporting FBDEV emulation support while only around 14 are currently supporting DRM_Panic as the new means of providing a “Blue Screen of Death” type functionality for Linux. But the thing is these DRM clients while different in use-case have APIs that end up being quite similar to each other.
So from NVIDIA’s perspective, they raise the valid point around the benefits of having more unification so that the same API could be better re-used by different DRM clients. At the same time there is ongoing work for a kernel-space bootsplash solution that would be another DRM client with likely a similar/same API to what’s used by the FBCON or DRM_Panic clients.
Thomas Zimmermann of SUSE has been working on a DRM client setup helper and facilitating the “drm_client” API to unify this mess.
Those wishing to learn more can find the PDF slide deck and the NVIDIA lightning talk presentation embedded above.
