[ranger_danger]

how is it broken?

[direwolf20]

The Xorg fbdev driver is deprecated. If you're not Xorg but you want to easily put some pixels on the screen, fbdev is still for you.

The Linux fbdev subsystem is deprecated, but the fb devices will be emulated with DRM because they are useful.

[ranger_danger]

is there an easy way to get a framebuffer with DRM without using fbdev?

[arghwhat]

It's not super easy. You need to allocate a buffer, modeset the display and commit the buffer.

But if you're doing that, then you've implemented a big portion of a display server. So... Just use one.

[direwolf20]

"dumb buffers" it's called. man drm-memory