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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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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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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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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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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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