GNOME's Dynamic Triple Buffering "Ready To Merge"
It's been years in the work for dynamic triple buffering for the GNOME Mutter compositor to engage triple buffering when needed in order to ramp up the GPU clocks in order to deliver better performance. In some tests with Intel integrated graphics it's meant going from 30 FPS to 60 FPS rendering of the GNOME desktop. It's also proven to be of good benefit for Raspberry Pi graphics.
Ubuntu and Debian have been carrying the GNOME Mutter dynamic triple buffering patches for years that have been maintained by Canonical's Daniel van Vugt. Throughout this time there's been more optimizations and re-basing to the latest upstream state. It looks like now though the GNOME Mutter dynamic triple buffering support might be finally ready to merge.
Van Vugt commented this morning in an Ubuntu desktop status update:
"Completed a redesign for mutter 46 that should get us closer to merging much sooner than carrying on with unified buffer management...Triple buffering is now out of draft status and ready to merge."
He added this week in the merge request:
"[KMS unify buffer management for all plane types] has been dropped. It's no longer a prerequisite and has basically been replaced by c76ad46d now, making this 29 commits instead of 41."
Collabora's Robert Mader commented in favor following that:
"From a first look: nice! FTR., I hope to get [Wayland direct scanout for cropped and scaled surfaces] into a mergable state soon and was worrying that would step on your toes here, but now it looks like it should be pretty compatible."
We'll see if after 3+ years of work if Mutter dynamic triple buffering is finally ready for upstream in GNOME 46.
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