GNOME Shell & Mutter 44 Release Candidates Bring Last Minute Changes

[smitty3268]

What baffles me is that some say triple buffering is the only fix for this, while others say it's a bad workaround and this has to be fixed in the driver.

My understanding is that the problem is that GPU firmware sucks, and has been specifically tuned to work well with Windows. Since windows does triple buffering, this is a "workaround" to make Mutter do the same thing, which makes the GPU firmware happier.

A better solution would be for the GPU manufacturers to stop making their firmware so stupid, but that's probably never going to happen as long as windows is their main target for sales.

[drake23]

To me it looks like the gnome devs just don't want outside contribution... I vaguely recall similar reasons in play when canonical decided to do Unity back in the days

[Artim]

To me it looks like the gnome devs just don't want outside contribution... I vaguely recall similar reasons in play when canonical decided to do Unity back in the days

And now think about why they abandoned it...


As many others already explained, it's not that they don't want outside contributions, but that this specific contribution simply requires too many changes that interfere with other improvements and right now simply isn't as bug free as it needs to be in order to be added.

[brent]

Triple buffering is absolutely *not* a hack. It does not result in extra power usage either, power consumption merely increases as needed to get rid of framedrops. If you want the lowest power consumption, just disable animations. Overall, it is a good solution to a complex issue. There are no good alternatives, as simple as that.

However, the mutter triple-buffering patchset is buggy and causes various strange issues. That is, of course, at least in part due to ongoing changes in GNOME that require constant changes. I'm not convinced the code quality is the best, but on the other hand, I definitely see little interest in getting the patchset merged from GNOME maintainers as well.

[MrCooper]

What baffles me is that some say triple buffering is the only fix for this, while others say it's a bad workaround and this has to be fixed in the driver.

I think it's mixing up different things.

Triple buffering is the correct solution and required for fully utilizing the CPU+GPU capacity for output frames. That's why mutter will most certainly get triple buffering support sooner or later.

It is however just a workaround for, and cannot fully solve, issues due to conservative scaling of CPU/GPU clocks. Those issues need to be addressed in the kernel and/or firmware.

[dimko]

I can't even switch my headphones from the bar without an extension or adjust mic gain etc.

And this is fault of gnome how exactly?(I am not saying its perfect...)