GNOME On Wayland Will Now Work Correctly For Non-60Hz Refresh Rates

It's been a busy week in GNOME's Mutter space as in addition to the GPU hot-plugging and DisplayLink improvements, Mutter when running as a Wayland compositor will now behave correctly when setup for non-60Hz display refresh rates.

Up to now when GNOME was running on Wayland it has basically been stuck to a 60Hz fake vsync refresh rate, but now it's able to query hardware presentation times and support swap throttling for working better in the growing world outside of 60Hz refresh rate displays. Of course, GNOME on the X.Org Server hasn't had such issues.

Closed today is now this year and a half old bug about changing the monitor refresh rate not working correctly under Wayland. The technical details are laid out by this merge request that had been open for the past four months before being closed today.

The code is now in Mutter Git for GNOME 3.32 to support swap throttling and hardware presentation times queried through the Linux KMS stack.

GNOME on Wayland is looking good for single monitor setups but there still is other code yet to be merged for improving the GNOME Wayland performance on multi-monitor setups. Hopefully those improvements can also be merged in time for the GNOME 3.32 debut in March.