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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?

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  • this page can help: raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=4649
    – Alessandro Cosentino
    Jun 22, 2012 at 21:39
  • @AlessandroCosentino I knew I'd read about it somewhere. Thanks for the reminder.
    – Jivings
    Jun 22, 2012 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, 2012 at 22:16
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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, 2013 at 14:04
  • 1
    Any news? The oldest comment is now more than a year old.
    – shrx
    Apr 22, 2015 at 15:41

6 Answers 6

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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.)

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  • Can you find a source for that statement..?
    – Jivings
    Jun 27, 2012 at 7:27
  • Jivings, click the link behind twitter feed. It is a link to the quoted statement on the official twitter feed of Raspberry Pi.
    – KnipSter
    Jul 5, 2012 at 22:49
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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 :-)

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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)

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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/

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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.

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

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2
  • This should not be an answer. Remember, link answers are not allowed.
    – xxmbabanexx
    Apr 3, 2013 at 14:23
  • Whilst this may theoretically answer the question, it would be preferable to include the essential parts of the answer here, and provide the link for reference.
    – Steve Robillard
    Mar 13, 2016 at 13:55

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