The Linux Kernel Is Now Left Without An Official FBDEV Maintainer

FBDEV has been slowly fading away for a number of years with DRM drivers becoming more friendly towards embedded use-cases and more. FBDEV hasn't fully died off yet, but as of Linux 4.10 it's now without a maintainer.

Tomi Valkeinen of Texas Instruments sent in the 4.10 FBDEV pull request with the sole change being that he drops himself as the FBDEV maintainer. He wrote in the message, "Please pull fbdev changes for 4.10, removing me from the maintainers file. No one has stepped up to take the job, so I've marked fbdev as orphan."

FBDEV maintainership has been marked as orphaned with no upstream developers expressing interest in taking over the role. No other FBDEV driver changes were submitted for the Linux 4.10 kernel.

Tomi Valkeinen is the developer who recently proposed dropping the FBDEV drivers in staging, but that work didn't fly as there aren't yet DRM driver alternatives to that code for avoiding users from losing any hardware support.

Hopefully in 2017 we'll see the FBDEV subsystem fade away further with DRM providing FBDEV emulation and the Direct Rendering Manager area continuing to be refined for lighter drivers while providing much more functionality.