Currently a lot of the atomicity in Wayland relies on how we batch up all requests in a protocol buffer and only flushes in the "blockhandler" in the client.  Consensus was that we need something more reliable and explicit.  The suggestion is that we make surface.attach a synchronization point such that everything before that is batched and applied atomically when the surface.attach request comes in.  For cases where we need atomicity beyond a surface.attach, we can add an atomic grouping mechanism, that can group together multiple surface.attach requests into a bigger atomic change.  To be researched a bit.