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0 pointsBenjiWiebe2y ago0 comments

It's hardware, and usually userspace can't talk directly to hardware.

0 comments

Sounds like an abstraction is appropriate. We could call it a "device driver". Is there a reason so many things get baked into the kernel, rather than using, say, kernel modules?

whalesalad2y ago

Pretty sure this is what DDC is supposed to solve. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_Data_Channel which is why this EDID post reminded me of this problem.

Problem is, regular DDC utils don't know how to communicate with this particular display.

Joke is on me, I shouldn't have spent $1,500 on a display that is pretty much exclusively designed to be connected to a Mac. But I was using it with a Mac for a while before building this new Linux box.

sho_hn2y ago

Relatively few things need to actually be baked into the kernel. Most features in the kernel codebase can be built as a module at will, especially drivers.

But it's the codebase that you patch, so "patching the kernel" doesn't mean the OP ruled out building it as a module in the end. Even though they may well be able to just build it against kernel headers and even load it at runtime.

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