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bigwheelstoday at 7:12 PM10 repliesview on HN

Why is DRM being implemented in the Kernel; What is the profile for an end-user who wants this in their FOSS?


Replies

voxic11today at 7:19 PM

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.

telotortiumtoday at 7:17 PM

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

Lorkkitoday at 7:17 PM

This is DRM as in Direct Rendering Manager, which is the kernel interface to GPU hardware; not Digital Rights Management.

show 1 reply
Shish2ktoday at 7:18 PM

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)

lultimouomotoday at 7:17 PM

Different DRM, the one in the kernel is Direct Rendering Manager, which is basically managing access to the GPU.

sapphyrustoday at 7:23 PM

DRM refers to Direct Rendering Manager in this context.

dralleytoday at 7:17 PM

DRM = Direct Rendering Manager. GPU scheduling.

proxycontoday at 7:21 PM

its the Direct Rendering Manager, not the other DRM