Atomic Mode-Setting Support For Wayland's Weston Might Finally Be Ready To Land

After going through fourteen rounds of patch revisions, Daniel Stone of Collabora might be ready to land his 40+ patches implementing atomic mode-setting support within Weston.

These patches allow Wayland's Weston reference compositor to make use of the Linux kernel's relatively new atomic mode-setting interfaces when dealing with mode-setting. Atomic mode-setting cleans up Linux's display mode-setting code and can make for a cleaner experience by testing a desired mode in advance of the commit operation, reducing possible flickering situations, and also being faster than the traditional mode-setting code-paths.

Collabora has been working on this atomic mode-setting for Weston for more than one year and after going through fourteen rounds of review, it looks like the code may be in shape to merge. Daniel Stone commented on these newest patches, "I did test hotplug and hot-unplug, which managed to tease out the plane_state fixes now seen in patch 06. But beyond that, it seemed entirely stable with whatever I threw at it. Hopefully this means we're actually good to go by now."

Intel's driver has been supporting atomic mode-setting the longest while the Nouveau driver has also supported these new interfaces for a few rounds while now with AMDGPU DC there is also atomic mode-setting when using the newer code-paths. There's also been some atomic mode-setting work for the ARM DRM drivers as well as for the Cirrus driver mainly for KVM VMs.

These latest Weston atomic patches can be found on wayland-devel.