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Comment by allenbina | Hacker News Reader

You would think they would be more aware of very commonly used acronyms, especially those with a negative connotation.

Direct Rendering Manager has been a part of the kernel since 1999, before the 2.4 release. At that time the term Digital Rights Management as a catch-all for CSS, dongles, etc wasn't widespread.

To keep with the theme of the thread: CSS = Content Scramble System, nothing to do with cascading style sheets.

'KMS' (kernel mode setting) probably disambiguates 'DRM' for most of those who are familiar with desktop Linux.

I read it as “key management system” i.e. TPM, and was confused too.

Heh, well I guess with only 26^3 TLAs to choose from, collisions are unavoidable.

That's why the world invented ETLAs and VELTAs

Or Key Management Services, activation method of Windows for enterprise.

DRM has been used by Direct Rendering Manager for 15 years or so, so it's itself a commonly used acronym.

I don't doubt it, but it was still a little frustrating -- as far as I can tell, DRM is never defined in the documentation on kernel.org. (I just doublechecked that by searching for "direct rendering" and nothing like "DRM (Direct Rendering Manager)" comes up.) I could tell from context that this didn't mean "digital rights management," but as someone who is not a GPU developer, I didn't have the context to figure it out.

So, I really think they should take a few extra words and put this in either the introduction to the GPU Driver Developer's Guide or the first page in the section entitled "DRM Internals". They do that for KMS!

There used to be some documentation that explicitly mentioned it by name, but it has since been removed: https://archive.ph/20140226185421/https://git.kernel.org/cgi...

No. If you are not in-the-know of linux trivia, this will be highly arcane to you.

It's not linux trivia - it's information anyone trying to get graphics drivers to work or looking for updates on linux might have come across.

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is what sprang to my mind.

Me too, and KMS is key management system or software. But I'm more in the devops side of the industry.

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