Hey all,
During the final days of Fedora Linux 34 development, it was discovered that Plasma Wayland hangs when kernel modesetting isn't available[1]. It was resolved for F34 with a downstream change to sddm that checks if "nomodeset" is set and disables Wayland sessions accordingly.
However, this is not a sustainable solution. Technically, Plasma Wayland supports fbdev, but it is not very good relative to the standard drm backend (and requires extra configuration to work). Additionally, GNOME Wayland *only* supports the drm backend and it fails entirely when "nomodeset" is set, thus GDM forces back to X11 in this scenario. As we move forward with adopting Wayland across the board, variations of this problem will happen over and over again.
So my questions are:
Do we want to support a "basic graphics mode"? If so (which I think we do), are there any alternatives to disabling KMS entirely that we could use? Perhaps vkms[2] is an option? If not, what do we do about it?
[1]: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1952431 [2]: https://dri.freedesktop.org/docs/drm/gpu/vkms.html