KMS Page-Flipping Ioctl Ready For Linux 2.6.32

Kristian Høgsberg has announced that the work he and Jesse Barnes, Jakob Bornecrantz, and Chris Wilson have been working on for the past few months is now ready for prime-time action. This work is the mode-setting page-flip ioctl for the kernel DRM. What this work basically leads to is tear-free updating of the screen with low-latency page-flipping.

Currently this code should work with both the Intel and ATI kernel mode-setting and is ready to enter the mainline Linux 2.6.32 kernel once the merge window opens. The mailing list message announcing this work along with the several hundred line DRM patch can be found on the dri-devel list.

Now that this work is out of the way, Kristian is planning to work on an Eagle+KMS back-end for Clutter, which will allow Clutter programs to run directly from a KMS frame-buffer. After that, a Wayland compositor for the Clutter tool-kit is on his agenda. This work is discussed here.