Direct Rendering Manager

Original author(s)kernel.org & freedesktop.org
Developer(s)kernel.org & freedesktop.org
Written inC
Type
License
Websitedri.freedesktop.org/wiki/DRM

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) is a subsystem of the Linux kernel responsible for interfacing with GPUs of modern video cards. 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. DRM was first developed as the kernel-space component of the X Server Direct Rendering Infrastructure,[1] but since then it has been used by other graphic stack alternatives such as Wayland and standalone applications and libraries such as SDL2 and Kodi.

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.

  1. ^ Cite error: The named reference DRM readme was invoked but never defined (see the help page).