GNOME's Mutter Begins Landing Transactional KMS Support

Adding to the excitement of GNOME 3.34 and the many changes being worked on is Mutter seeing the initial merging of transactional kernel mode-setting (KMS) support.

This effort that has already been going on for months is about adopting a transactional API for Mutter so that it can make use of the Linux kernel's atomic KMS API. All of the key Linux DRM/KMS drivers these days support the atomic API (and is a requirement for merging of new drivers) but so far not many Linux desktop user-space components have switched over to using the new APIs.

This GNOME Transactional KMS support also has a goal of ultimately allowing its KMS interaction to be done in a separate CPU thread that can't be blocked by OpenGL rendering or other work.

So far Mutter has seen works done on restructuring of its APIs and to support transactional monitor configuration and page-flipping while other work remains in-progress.

Merged today to Mutter Git for GNOME 3.34 is the initial KMS transactional support. Hopefully the remainder of this transactional work can be finished for the GNOME 3.34 cycle but that has yet to be seen for how long it will take to fully sort out.