When Ubuntu 22.04 LTS was released a few months ago, since the GNOME desktop it used had not yet adopted the L3 cache patch, Canonical developed a Mutter patch that supports this feature and shipped it on Ubuntu 22.04.

Now, in the upcoming Ubuntu 22.10, the patch continues to be maintained for GNOME 43. It supports dynamic L3 cache with Mutter compositor, which makes Ubuntu’s GNOME desktop environment perform better on some systems, but GNOME upstream has not been merged – although GNOME maintainers also agree that this patch will significantly improve the experience, but Before there is a solution that can be considered upstream, users or distributions want to have it, they need to make it a downstream patch, as the saying goes.

Canonical developer Daniel Van Vugt has contributed numerous fixes/improvements to GNOME upstream over the past few years, and he spent a lot of time designing GNOME’s L3 cache support. In the summer of 2020, Daniel has been working on GNOME’s L3 cache support development in case GPU rendering performance lags behind the planned runtime. Daniel also re-tested the performance of this technology in different environments, where the L3 cache brought the biggest performance improvement for Intel and Raspberry Pi, and the highest frame rate could be increased by 100%.

Recently, Daniel also published a discussion thread titled “Why Ubuntu 22.04 is so fast”. There he outlines the dynamic L3 cache patch for 22.04 and 22.10, as well as some optimization tweaks.