After a few years of development the atomic display update IOCTL for drm drivers is finally ready for prime time with the 4.2 pull request from Dave Airlie. It’s been a long road, with a lot of drivers already converted over to atomic and even more in progress, the atomic helper libraries and support code in the drm subsystem sufficiently polished. But what’s really missing is a design overview of what the overall atomic infrastructure looks like and why some decisions and details are implemented like they are.

That’s now done and published on LWN: Part 1 talks about the problem space, issues with the Android atomic display framework and the basic atomic IOCTL interface. Part 2 goes into more detail about a few specific things like locking, helper library design and the exact semantics of atomic modessetting updates. Happy Reading!