GNOME 40 Mutter Moves Input Work To A Separate Thread

An exciting addition for GNOME 40 is that the Mutter compositor will be punting the input work off to a separate CPU thread.

The long in development effort by Red Hat's Carlos Garnacho for restructuring Mutter so that the input work can be handled in a separate CPU thread has finally reached the state where on Friday it was merged into Git.

This merge request has been open for the past three months but merged on Friday to handle input on a separate thread.

By moving the input work to a separate thread should allow for avoiding possible blocked cursor pointer situations, better dealing with high frequency input devices, ensuring no libinput events are missed, and just being a superior architecture.

This should provide a big user experience improvement in ensuring that mouse cursor updates aren't stalled when the main Mutter thread is busy under Wayland.

GNOME 40 with this work and much more is scheduled for release in March (24 March).