Restoring HDMI-CEC on Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm with FKMS

Raspberry Pi OS moved from the FKMS display driver (vc4-fkms-v3d) to KMS (vc4-kms-v3d). For most users this is fine, but if you run Kodi as a media center, KMS brings some unwelcome side effects — elevated CPU load from D-state wait inflation, colour accuracy issues with certain TVs, and a generally less mature video playback path compared to the older driver.

Reverting to FKMS fixes all of that, but breaks one thing: HDMI-CEC stops working. Your TV remote can no longer control Kodi, because the standard libcec package only knows how to talk to the kernel’s /dev/cec0 device — which FKMS does not create.

I rebuilt libcec with the deprecated HAVE_RPI_API flag enabled, which activates the firmware-level VCHI CEC adapter that bypasses the kernel path entirely. The result is a set of drop-in .deb packages that restore full CEC functionality on Bookworm with FKMS.

The packages are available as an APT repository hosted on this domain, so installation is a few commands:

echo "deb [trusted=yes arch=arm64] https://ivanvari.com/rpi-libcec-fkms/repo bookworm main" \
  | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/rpi-libcec-fkms.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libcec6 cec-utils

Full documentation, build instructions, and source are on GitHub: github.com/variia/rpi-libcec-fkms