Ubuntu Talks Up Its GNOME Dynamic Triple Buffering Support In 22.04/22.10

Originally carried as a patch against Ubuntu 22.04 for its GNOME 42 desktop and continued to be maintained against GNOME 43 for the upcoming Ubuntu 22.10 is supporting dynamic triple buffering with the Mutter compositor. This has allowed Ubuntu's GNOME desktop environment to perform better for some systems albeit not upstream in GNOME.

The GNOME triple buffering support was worked on over the period of many months by Daniel van Vugt with Canonical. The work proved to be especially useful for improving desktop performance with Intel graphics and the Raspberry Pi. Ultimately it helps out some lower-end systems as it ends up leading to the graphics processor's clock frequency ramping up when running behind schedule.

Due to upstream GNOME developers not viewing the code as ready, earlier this year it was patched into Ubuntu 22.04's GNOME Mutter build and again was re-based for GNOME 43 with Ubuntu 22.10 due to still not being upstream. The dynamic triple buffering has now missed the window for potentially being included in GNOME 43, which is debuting as stable later this month.

In the upstream merge request the latest commentary by Collabora's Robert Mader on its upstreaming prospects amounts to:

Unsetting the milestone as unfortunately there's no timeline to merge this in it's current form. We of course know that for many users this MR improves the experience a lot, however until a solution deemed ready for upstream arrives, users or distros wanting to have it will need to carry it as downstream patch.

P.S.: some good things need time ;)

Daniel van Vugt meanwhile published a new Ubuntu discourse entry entitled "Why Ubuntu 22.04 is so fast (and how to make it faster)" That post outlines the dynamic triple buffering found patches for 22.04 and 22.10 along with some optimization tweaks for those interested.