Ubuntu's Mir Working On Hybrid Graphics / Multi-GPU Support

Canonical continues investing in Mir as their Wayland compositor and set of platform abstraction interfaces to make it easier for IoT and other "smart" devices to run atop Ubuntu Core. Most recently the Mir developers have been working to partially re-architect their graphics platform handling to better handle multiple GPU/display devices.

Mir has been seeing a rework to its graphics platform handling to better support multiple graphics platform targets/back-ends to work simultaneously as well as breaking up the logic that the display output and graphics rendering are being done on the same device/GPU.

This ongoing rework is allowing hybrid graphics platforms to be supported where a GPU will do the faster 3D rendering while the display scan-out is being handled by integrated graphics or an alternate device. This Mir rework is also important for use-cases like rendering and then presenting the output via a USB-attached DisplayLink adapter or similar.

In turn for the next release the Canonical developers working on Mir are hoping to have hybrid graphics supported, which is better late than never. More details on this Mir graphics platform rework via the Ubuntu Discourse.