I am delighted to announce that I am returning for Google Summer of Code 2026 to contribute to GNOME once again. Following my work on Crosswords last year, I will be shifting focus to the core of the desktop: Mutter. For what it’s worth, I never left; I’ve been working with Jonathan to improve things and add shiny new features in Crosswords.
Mutter serves as the Wayland display server and compositor library for GNOME Shell. Currently, a GPU reset invalidates the EGL context and causes the loss of all allocated GPU memory, resulting in the entire desktop crashing or freezing.
My project aims to implement a robust recovery mechanism for GPU resets to prevent these session-ending freezes, under the mentorship of Jonas Ådahl, Robert Mader, and Carlos Garnacho. Leveraging the GL_EXT_robustness extension, I will implement reset detection, context re-creation, and re-upload of essential GPU resources, such as client textures, glyph caches, and background images. This will allow the compositor to resume rendering seamlessly after hardware-level failures.
Over the course of the project, I will share updates on the progress of these recovery mechanisms and the challenges of managing state restoration within the compositor.
I am very grateful to my mentors, Jonas, Robert, and Carlos, for the opportunity to work on this critical part of the GNOME ecosystem. Also, a big shout-out to Federico, Hans Petter, and Jonathan for their continuous support. I look forward to another productive summer with the community. 🦾❤️
