GNOME's Mutter On Wayland Will Now Support GPU Hot-Plugging

Written by Michael Larabel in GNOME on 21 November 2018 at 09:05 PM EST. 8 Comments
GNOME
GNOME's Mutter compositor native back-end will now deal with GPU hot-plugging at run-time and begin managing its display outputs.

GPU hot-plugging isn't particularly common but this Mutter backend work was done to improve the USB DisplayLink graphics support. This GPU hotplug code may also help external GPUs like those connected via Thunderbolt.

This GPU hotplug support addition is now merged. This work also comes just days after a performance optimization to also benefit DisplayLink/USB-driven displays. That optimization changes the performance on some hardware from taking multiple seconds to less than 20ms for some operations. "Obviously that makes Mutter and gnome-shell completely unusable. With this patch, that function takes 13-18 ms which makes it usable if not fluent."

Great to see the GNOME Wayland experience for DisplayLink hardware improving. These changes will be part of the GNOME 3.32 release due out in March.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week