VirtualBox DRM Driver Gets Patches To Go Atomic, Promote Out Of Staging

We've known Red Hat was working on converting the VirtualBox "vboxvideo" DRM/KMS driver to using the atomic APIs for atomic mode-setting to replace the legacy APIs and now those patches are out there.

Red Hat's Hans de Goede sent out the 15 patches on Wednesday for wiring up the atomic mode-setting interfaces to replace the legacy APIs. Red Hat developers have been doing this as they were the ones pushing for getting the VirtualBox guest drivers into the mainline kernel itself with Oracle's developers working on VirtualBox sadly lacking that initiative.

By moving to the atomic APIs is also the requirement these days for getting a DRM/KMS driver into the mainline kernel proper rather than the staging area. Once these patches are merged, they are planning on having the vboxvideo driver promoted out of the kernel's staging space.

The 15 patches providing atomic for this VirtualBox guest display driver can be found on dri-devel. Given the close timing for the DRM-Next cutoff, it remains to be seen if these patches will manage to get into the 4.20~5.0 cycle (along with the promoting out of staging) or if will be held off until the next cycle. Regardless, it's great that Red Hat has been improving this driver for those using VirtualBox with Linux systems for desktop VMs.