Low-level Graphics on Raspberry Pi vs other Linux distributions

In the very first post on this subject I suggested the examples would apply to other systems as well - luckily I did add the caveat 'some of the code' ;)

As it appears that the support for the framebuffer driver and the functionality it provides seems to in fact differ a lot between Linux distributions and graphics hardware specific drivers. This was way simpler back in the day I started with Linux fb some 20 years ago... So unfortunately cannot promise the examples will fully work on even another Debian based system. Some of you readers had already found this out some time ago, apologies if it seemed I promised more than I delivered.

I have recently played with a Debian 8.3.0 distribution on a desktop PC. I found out that for example changing the bits_per_pixel does not return errors and querying the information back after setting looks like it went through. But trying to plot pixels will not produce the expected result - it appears that the fb is still in 32 bit mode even when it reports 8 bit :/ Of course any 32 bit pixel plotting code works fine...

I modified the original test program a bit to output some more information. One additional bit (well, a string actually :D ) of information is the fb_fix_screeninfo.id which should give us the fb driver 'name' - for my setup this is inteldrmfb:

The 'drm' part there suggests that the driver is implementing the more recent Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) model and the fbdev support is not complete. If running other distributions and interested in low level graphics it would be worth investigation the DRM API libdrm.