KDE's KWin Adds DMA-Fence Deadline Support

KDE's KWin compositor has added DMA-Fence deadline support to its DRM back-end that can help ensure rendering is completed on-time and otherwise helping to boost the GPU clock speeds.

Prominent KWin developer Xaver Hugl wrote DMA-Fence deadlines support for the DRM back-end three months ago and that work has finally been merged. Hugl explained with the code merged this morning:

"This tells the kernel when a buffer should be done rendering, which allows it to for example increase GPU clocks in order to hopefully hit our deadlines. That in turn should reduce the amount of dropped frames."

This work was done in part to address this bug report from early 2022 over animations on KDE Wayland not being as smooth with Intel integrated graphics compared to when using KDE Plasma with the X.Org Server (X11) session.

Adding this DMA-Fence deadline support is great ahead of the Plasma 6.0 release coming up in February where the Plasma Wayland session is preferred by default.