GNOME Shell + Mutter Patches Pending For Wayland Fullscreen Compositing Bypass

There's an exciting patch set to GNOME Shell and Mutter now pending for finally wiring up the full-screen unredirected display / full-screen bypass compositing for helping the performance of full-screen games in particular on Wayland.

GNOME on X11 has long supported the full-screen compositing bypass so the window manager / compositor gets out of the way when running full-screen games/applications. That support under Wayland hasn't been in place and thus there is a performance hit for full-screen Wayland-native software. But now thanks to Red Hat's Jonas Ådahl, that infrastructure now appears to be ready.

On Friday, Jonas opened the Mutter bits and GNOME Shell bits for handling this behavior with their Wayland support. The GNOME Shell bits were already merged while Mutter changes are still pending and contingent upon first landing another related merge request.

Great to see this work at the edge of merging and shortly I'll be running some fresh X11/Wayland and multi-desktop Linux gaming benchmarks given the recent releases and autumn Linux distribution releases coming up.