Articles & Reviews
News Archive
Forums
Premium
Contact
Categories

Computers Display Drivers Graphics Cards Linux Gaming Memory Motherboards Processors Software Storage Operating Systems Peripherals

GNOME Mutter Adds Intermediate ShadowFB For Faster Software Rendering

Written by Michael Larabel in GNOME on 4 November 2019 at 06:58 AM EST. 9 Comments

Landing in GNOME's Mutter tree today is a change for GNOME 3.36 improving the effectiveness of running the GNOME Shell desktop with a software renderer like LLVMpipe.

The change by Red Hat's Olivier Fourdan introduces an intermediate shadow frame-buffer for applying of transformations to the in-memory frame-buffers before blitting to the screen. This intermediate shadowfb should "keep things fast(ish)" when lacking OpenGL hardware acceleration.

Fourdan describes the intermediate shadow frame-buffer support as now being fast enough for "achieve acceptable performance even with software rendering on discrete GPU."

More details on this Mutter change via the MR that was merged a short time ago.

9 Comments

GNOME Working To Make Key Rack A Viable Password Manager, Better Printing For Flatpaks

GTK4 Continues Improving Graphics Offload & DMA-BUF Integration

GNOME Mutter Lands NVIDIA Hybrid GPU Copy Acceleration

GNOME Improving Integration With systemd-homed, Mockups For An OS Installer

GNOME's Mutter Lands DRM Sync Obj v1 Support For Explicit Sync On Wayland

About The Author

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.