Atomic Mode-Setting Support For Wayland's Weston

Daniel Stone at Collabora has been working on atomic mode-setting support for Wayland's Weston compositor.

One of the primary benefits of the DRM driver supporting atomic mode-setting is that it can allow a full mode-set operation to be tested prior to actually being committed to ensure it can be properly handled by the driver and display hardware. For end-users, this is meant to yield less problems and ideally avoid any display flickering. Atomic mode-setting support has been ongoing within the Linux kernel's DRM drivers for a while now, though more patches still have yet to be mainlined. Daniel has been leading the charge to let Weston make use of the atomic mode-setting interfaces to the Linux kernel.

Daniel today posted the second version of this feature for Weston but it relies on some yet-to-be-mainlined functionality within the Linux kernel as well as the DRM library (libdrm). Those wanting to checkout this forthcoming functionality for Weston to improve the experience when changing modes, checkout the patch series here.