Atomic Mode-Setting Moves Along For KMS Drivers

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Atomic Mode-Setting Moves Along For KMS Drivers

While drm-next closing in a few weeks for Linux 3.19, Daniel Vetter of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center has written a status update concerning the long ongoing work concerning atomic mode-setting...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTgyOTM

[saski]

Sounds interesting. But what does this actually do for me as a user? More efficient power consumption, better compatibility or more GPU performance perhaps? What's is the advantage for all the efford the intel devs put into this?

[katajakasa]

As I understood it, the whole point here is to reduce screen flickering. Currently, if you change screen mode, the process has many steps and all of them have to succeed. If any of the steps fails, all the operations have to be rolled back one by one, which may cause flickering. Atomic mode setting would cause all of the operation either succeed or fail together, hence no flickering.

Please correct me if I'm wrong :P