The State of GNOME 40's Threaded Input

One of many improvements we have been looking forward to with GNOME 40 is Mutter now having a separate input thread with its native back-end for Wayland.

That allows more of the input work to happen in a separate CPU thread. The code was merged back in November and has seen improvements ahead of the GNOME 40 debut in March. This week on the GNOME Shell and Mutter blog was a post looking at the current state of this work.

At the moment in Mutter this threaded input allows for libinput events to be dispatched quicker, input handling not being stalled by the main thread work in Mutter, better cursor plane position updating, and an improved structure to the input code.

Still to be done is addressing the matter of the pointer cursor freezing if the main Mutter thread is stalled, the main thread still being involved with Ctrl + Alt + Fn handling, and other work to nicely handle 1000Hz+ mice and other high frequency input devices.

More details as to the current state of Mutter's threaded input for GNOME 40 can be found at GNOME.org.