Atomic Async Page Flips Expected To Land For Linux 6.8

Following yesterday's week drm-misc-next pull that added the new Imagination PowerVRM DRM driver, the three patches for atomic DRM_MODE_PAGE_FLIP_ASYNC were queued into drm-misc-next. Now that this atomic async page flip support is in drm-misc-next, next week it should appear in DRM-Next and in turn make it for the Linux 6.8 kernel in the new year.

Going back to mid 2022 there was a proposal for atomic async page flips with interest by Valve and planning to make use of it within the Gamescope compositor. DRM_MODE_PAGE_FLIP_ASYNC itself has been around for years but not wired up into the DRM/KMS code path for atomic commits. This DRM_MODE_PAGE_FLIP_ASYNC atomic support after being floated on the mailing lists for more than one year is finally on its way to mainline for helping Linux gamers.

The Gamescope compositor already sets DRM_MODE_PAGE_FLIP_ASYNC since last year with the "Async flip stuff" pull and initially wired up around the gamescope_tearing_control_unstable_v1 Wayland protocol while since then has been the more formalized tearing-control protocol for those wanting the best performance at the risk of screen tearing.

The individual DRM drivers need to support DRM_MODE_PAGE_FLIP_ASYNC but the major milestone now is that it's in drm-misc-next on its way toward Linux 6.8.