Description of interfaces for automatic resolution change and desktop layout (multimon) in a virtualized environment: Note that these properties were first implemented by the qxl driver and have just recently been implemented also by VMware but in any case they could probably be viewed as some type of evolving standard for virtualized environments. Gnome-shell works with the below interfaces both in the Xorg- and in the wayland / DRM configurations. The DRM KMS interface: Each connector exposes the following properties: *) hotplug_mode_update - if 1 indicates that the mode list and preferred mode may change following an uevent. *) suggested X, suggested Y - (note the spaces instead of underscore). In a multimon environment, suggests the X and Y desktop coordinate for a connector. Following a uevent, the client should, for all connectors - Check if the connector is connected, in that case enable the connector, read the preferred mode, set the mode and set the connector to scan out starting at the suggested desktop origin. - Disable the connector if not connected. Future extensions: The above interface is racy as a new uevent may be triggered and values updated while the client is reading the values. With atomic modesetting it should be possible to assign each suggested configuration a sequence number and have the modesetting operation back off if the sequence numbers don't match. Similar to how XRandR works. This has not been discussed yet on the DRM list, though, and in practice races are more theorectial than they seem to have an effect on the user's experience. The Xorg interface: The Xorg XRandR interface (if Xorg is used as a backend for the compositor) is pretty identical except that the sequence is triggered by (IIRC) an XRRScreenChangeNotifyEvent. VMware implementation: For this to work with VMware a relatively new kernel version is needed, an xf86-video-vmware driver 13.2.1 or later needs to be installed (but not necessarily running) and a patched version of open-vm-tools present (the patch is to appear on the open-vm-tools GitHub webpage quite soon, or can be obtained from me on request. Note that if running Xorg, the xf86-video-vmware driver 13.2.1 and later will, if running, try to perform the automatic screen resizing and output placement if it detects a uevent from DRM, so any Xorg client trying to do the same thing will actually try to race with the Xorg driver. However XRandR will make sure that the client will see the configuration set by the Xorg driver before it reacts on the new property values. /Thomas