KDE Plasma 5.21 To Bring Multi-GPU Support For Wayland

KDE developers have been busy not only putting the finishing touches on the soon to be released Plasma 5.20 but also early feature work continues on what will be Plasma 5.21.

Most exciting of the latest batch of 5.21 feature work is, again, about Wayland. KDE Plasma 5.21 will allow iGPU multi-monitor functionality for simultaneously using both integrated and discrete graphics for driving multiple monitors. This is basically multi-GPU output support on Wayland with KDE Plasma by using Udev and the DRM back-end for making use of all available GPUs on the system.

Plasma 5.21 also now has the capability for displaying notifications on unreliable network connections and if likely to lose the Internet/network connection, among other improvements outlined this week by KDE developer Nate Graham.

With KDE Plasma 5.20 set for release on 13 October, this past week saw a rush of last minute fixes for this desktop update. As usual, Wayland saw a lot of fixes -- including fixing the initialization of DMA-BUF textures in KWin on Wayland for Plasma 5.20, KRunner being more responsive to typed text, and various other fixes both to the Wayland-specific code and other general items.

More details on this week's KDE changes via Nate's blog.