GNOME's Mutter On Wayland Will Now Support GPU Hot-Plugging

GNOME's Mutter compositor native back-end will now deal with GPU hot-plugging at run-time and begin managing its display outputs.

GPU hot-plugging isn't particularly common but this Mutter backend work was done to improve the USB DisplayLink graphics support. This GPU hotplug code may also help external GPUs like those connected via Thunderbolt.

This GPU hotplug support addition is now merged. This work also comes just days after a performance optimization to also benefit DisplayLink/USB-driven displays. That optimization changes the performance on some hardware from taking multiple seconds to less than 20ms for some operations. "Obviously that makes Mutter and gnome-shell completely unusable. With this patch, that function takes 13-18 ms which makes it usable if not fluent."

Great to see the GNOME Wayland experience for DisplayLink hardware improving. These changes will be part of the GNOME 3.32 release due out in March.