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At present all of the official builds of the X Window System run on the CPU, which takes up a lot of processing power and runs X rather slowly.

I know there's no official GPU accelerated version of X11 yet, at least not from X.org, but has anyone worked on this and released anything behind the scenes?

Jivings
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berry120
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  • this page can help: http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=4649 – Alessandro Cosentino Jun 22 '12 at 21:39
  • @AlessandroCosentino I knew I'd read about it somewhere. Thanks for the reminder. – Jivings Jun 22 '12 at 22:02
  • @Jivings: feel free to summarize it and make it an answer. I don't have time to do it atm. – Alessandro Cosentino Jun 22 '12 at 22:16
  • I think this is about as much info as you can hope for on this subject at the moment --> http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-software-2/hardware-acceleration-using-opengl-and-x11-876634/ – flexage Jun 23 '12 at 06:15
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    Are there any news on this subject? The accelerated Weyland and the experimental Xorg server are both now many months old. – Arne Nov 12 '13 at 14:04
  • @Arne Accelerated Weyland is gaining momentum, and from a brief play with it seems to work relatively well. However, there are still drawbacks, the one in particular for me is that Java doesn't recognise that particular environment (and thus throws a headless exception whenever you try to do anything graphical.) Beyond that though I'm not sure - my experience is still rather limited. – berry120 Nov 12 '13 at 14:34
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    Any news? The oldest comment is now more than a year old. – shrx Apr 22 '15 at 15:41
  • A promising GLX-capable and "desktop" OpenGL driver is in the works since June 2014 : https://wiki.freedesktop.org/dri/VC4/ – flakeshake Dec 10 '15 at 13:55

6 Answers6

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According to the official Raspberry_Pi twitter feed, GPU accelerated X.org is not yet available.

26 June 2012: @Raspberry_Pi :

The Wheezy beta's worth a go http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/1435 - but X isn't hardware accelerated yet. (It will be soon.)

KnipSter
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Currently, best two answers are from Raspberry PI's Liz and forum poster Simon (teh_orph):

  • "Accelerated X will be a solved problem soon; we've put engineering resource on it, and it's actively being worked on."

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?p=194400#p194400

  • "I've finally gotten a handle on the AXI burst value (...) That's a 5x increase in window dragging/upload/download performance..."

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=4649&start=200#p197360

So, in both cases, the answer is NO, but things may change soon :-)

Henrique
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4

Eric Anholt has been working on completely overhauling the Raspberry Graphics Stack since July 2014. This means it was done "properly" - everything is opensource and directly in upstream: kernel.org, mesa3d.org, x.org etc. This also means everything using OpenGL inside X (GLX) automatically started working as soon his efforts flowed down into Raspbian !

As of 2018, his work is already included in Raspbian but disabled by default. Some stability issues remain. Start raspi-config and go to "Advanced options".

You can follow Erics trials and tribulations on his blog "This week in VC4 " ("VideoCore 4" is the name of the Raspberry Pi GPU)

flakeshake
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2

There is (kind of). A nice bit of work has been done with Wayland/Weston support for RPi. It's not X11 server anymore, but there's emulation interface for X11 applications, which gives faster updates than the native, unaccelerated X.Org. The new versions of GTK & QT support it.
See (you get 500Mpix/sec from the VideoCore):
1) http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/4053
2)http://www.collabora.com/services/case-studies/raspberrypi/

A.Genchev
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There is an experimental release of an accelerated X server available here:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=28294

Sources are available over at github:

https://github.com/simonjhall/fbdev_exa

The whole thing is supposed to be still somewhat buggy, and there are warnings about possible data loss etc. But still I think it would be good if some people would test drive it.

Arne
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0

The unofficial (is there any official?) Xorg driver details can be found here: http://elinux.org/RPi_Xorg_rpi_Driver

Tihauan
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