Ubuntu 24.04 LTS To Ship With Some Extra GNOME Performance Optimizations

In addition to the GNOME triple buffering patches that still haven't been merged to Mutter's mainline branch, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and upstream Debian are slated to currently carry a few extra performance optimizations.

First up, on the triple buffering side Canonical's Daniel van Vugt continues pursuing the effort and recently rolled out a minor redesign to the code raised during the ongoing review. There's no known bugs right now while this years-in-development patch series hasn't been merged yet.

This past week Daniel van Vugt opened this merge request for Debian's Mutter package. The plan is for Debian and in turn Ubuntu 24.04 LTS to carry some separate but additional performance optimizations.

One of the patches there is for NVIDIA secondary GPU copy acceleration to allow the GPU to be used for secondary monitors plugged into secondary GPUs within Wayland sessions. Currently Mutter is using slower CPU buffer copies that is leading to poor performance in this scenario. This aims to address a bug report on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS from April 2022.

That merge also has a patch to the KMS CRTC code to fix some mouse cursor stutter issues on Mutter 45 due to a KMS thread optimization.

So short of the patches being merged upstream before then, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS this spring is at least slated to boast these performance optimizations.