Nouveau DRM Driver Progressing With Atomic Mode-Setting, DP MST

We've known Nouveau DRM maintainer Ben Skeggs of Red Hat has been working on atomic mode-setting and DisplayPort Multi-Stream Transport (DP MST) for this open-source NVIDIA Linux driver as that what led to Nouveau having no feature additions for Linux 4.9. Some of this code is now having the Nouveau kernel development tree.

With some Nouveau changes already staged for Linux 4.10 via DRM-Next, Ben Skeggs has been landing some of his work into the Nouveau tree. This includes some atomic-related code and DP 1.2 multi-stream support. There has also been other Nouveau KMS changes hitting today including dropping old (non-atomic) code and other code related to prepping support for the atomic interfaces.

Good to see the atomic mode-setting code coming along for Nouveau. Atomic mode-setting allows setting output modes more cleanly by either being able to succeed or fail in one-go while also being able to test a desired mode in advance of the operation, reducing possible flickering situations while also being quicker. Nouveau appears to be lading the AMDGPU DRM on supporting atomic mode-setting with this functionality on the AMD side also being held up by needing to mainline the DAL display abstraction code. Hopefully this updated Nouveau KMS code will be ready for merging in Linux 4.10.