GNOME Mutter Lands Improved GPU Selection Logic For Laptops

Merged today to GNOME's Mutter compositor is improved logic for selecting the graphics processor to treat as the primary one within multi-GPU laptops.

The change made to GNOME Mutter is prefering the GPU (if any) that have an eDP attached and enabled. Rather than treating the first integrated GPU within the PCI topology layout, Mutter will now opt for any GPU as primary if there is an enabled eDP display panel attached.

This stems from a bug report last month noting that Mutter can sometimes pick the wrong primary GPU if the discrete GPU appears before the integrated graphics in the PCI topology.

The bug report and resulting fix were crafted by AMD Linux engineer Mario Limonciello.

This improved logic is known to help at least ASUS Strix laptop models where the NVIDIA GPU is exposed prior to the AMD Radeon integrated graphics. This will hopefully help some other laptops as well with their primary GPU selection with this more reasonable behavior for determining the primary GPU.