29 September 2025 to 1 October 2025
Europe/Vienna timezone

Userspace virtual terminal in 2025

1 Oct 2025, 17:40
5m
Lightning Talk (5 minutes) Lightning Talk Lightning Talks

Speaker

Jocelyn Falempe (Red Hat)

Description

In 2014, an initiative emerged to supplant the kernel's graphical console, fbcon, with a userspace alternative named Kmscon. Despite this effort, and fbcon's subsequent loss of scrolling support due to a CVE, most Linux distributions continue to default to fbcon in 2025.

This presentation will explore various alternatives designed to enhance the user experience beyond what fbcon currently offers. These include:

  • Kmscon: A minimalist userspace solution that remains actively maintained.
  • Userspacevt: A collection of scripts enabling the use of a Wayland compositor and a graphical terminal to replace fbcon. I have packaged several combinations for Fedora, such as Cage/Foot, Gnome-kiosk/Ptyxis, and Kwin/Konsole.
  • DRM Log: A kernel module leveraging the DRM infrastructure to display early kernel boot logs.
Code of Conduct Yes
In-person or virtual presentation In-person
GSoC, EVoC or Outreachy No

Primary author

Presentation Materials

2025 Host
Technische Universität Wien
2025 Gold Sponsors
AMD
Arm
Collabora
Microsoft
NVIDIA
Snap AR
2025 Silver Sponsors
CodeWeavers
FEX-Emu
Igalia
Qualcomm
The Linux Foundation
2025 Bronze Sponsors
Khronos Group
Libre Computer