Reverse PRIME Now Works Nicely On Ubuntu 24.10

For those making use of "reverse PRIME" setups where you have a primary NVIDIA discrete GPU while monitors are connected to Intel integrated graphics as the secondary GPU, such configurations should be working nicely with the upcoming Ubuntu 24.10 release under Wayland. This support is also likely to be back-ported for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

Daniel Van Vugt of Canonical's Ubuntu desktop team and known for his upstream GNOME contributions commented in yesterday's Ubuntu desktop team update:

"Verified reverse PRIME (Nvidia as primary GPU with monitors also connected to Intel as secondary) now just works in 24.10 Wayland sessions. That was a surprise."

Going back to 2022 had been a bug report for seeking reverse PRIME support for Wayland on Ubuntu:

"Reverse PRIME support for Wayland (Nvidia as primary GPU outputting to Intel GPU display ports)

This is different to the usual dual GPU setup where Intel is primary and Nvidia is secondary."

In that bug report it's mentioned to possibly backport the upstream Mutter change for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. But as it stands right now the reverse PRIME on Wayland support should be working nicely for Ubuntu 24.10.

The upstream support in Mutter comes from this change made last month to Mutter for returning the correct number of EGL modifiers. Just a few lines of code was the missing piece to reverse PRIME on GNOME Wayland.