
Originally Posted by
Delgarde
Actually, no. You're right, it's an implementation detail, but it's a significant one. For the open drivers, KMS provides a single consistent method of mode setting, meaning that we have a solution that works for the console, for X, for Wayland, and anything else that might come up. It means that even lacking a decent hardware-accelerated driver, there's always the option to fall back to framebuffer.
By not supporting KMS, Nvidia can't do that. You can't write a system that, e.g switches to a high-res mode for a bootsplash screen, then seamlessly hands over to X. Nor can you switch between X and a console without a mode switch. It can't even co-exist with the KMS support that the Nouveau guys have added. And that's because all that Nvidia provide is an X driver - a very good one, to be sure, but one which provides no integration with the standard way of doing things on Linux.