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Vastly Improved Raspberry Pi Performance With Wayland
New submitter nekohayo writes "While Wayland/Weston 1.1 brought support to the Raspberry Pi merely a month ago, work has recently been done to bring true hardware-accelerated compositing capabilities to the RPi's graphics stack using Weston. The Raspberry Pi foundation has made an announcement about the work that has been done with Collabora to make this happen. X.org/Wayland developer Daniel Stone has written a blog post about this, including a video demonstrating the improved reactivity and performance. Developer Pekka Paalanen also provided additional technical details about the implementation."
Rather than using the OpenGL ES hardware, the new compositor implementation uses the SoC's 2D scaler/compositing hardware which offers "a scaling throughput of 500 megapixels per second and blending throughput of 1 gigapixel per second. It runs independently of the OpenGL ES hardware, so we can continue to render 3D graphics at the full, very fast rate, even while compositing."
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
And Wayland sucks because it doesn't do graphics forwarding. Even though I never use that feature of X. And ignoring that Wayland is being developed by many of the same people who develop X.org. Oh yes, I know what I'm talking about.
I sliced a piece of pie off my cow and threw it in the sea. The ocean boiled and cooked fish rose and I took them and fed them to the trees. What's a pretty picture and who is that pretty young thing? Quark, equine, quinine.
Hark, the sound of rabid waves! I smash the beast within but let the beast without free to ravage and rampage. I saw the end times.
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
If X11 is so good, why isn't Android using it?
Because Android is a toy OS for cellphones.
Wayland working on Pi is nice, but it's still a non-starter as long as it lacks networking.
That's what a lot of us want to know, frankly. It's the last thing that NEEDED poking with a stick. Well, except for init scripts (here's looking at your sorry ass, systemd).
I've been playing with linux since before 1.0, and using linux on the desktop a lot for 15 years and almost exclusively for the last decade, on all kinds of hardware, and never once felt the slightest failing in X11 (or init scripts). I've felt a lot of failings in other areas, but not those.
I don't care as much about applications that I use now, as about applications that will be written in the future but will be crippled by Wayland. Use one of them, and X11 remote access is broken forever, for everything.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
but it doesnt change the fact the pi is a circa 2000 computer doing 2013 tasks ... poorly and hacky
Having used PCAnywhere, VNC, X11, ICA, RDP, and PCoIP - X11 rates last in terms of performance. It rates last in terms of features.
That's because you used it as if it's PCAnywhere -- to run a single application, over a long, high-latency line. What is not what X11 is for (but X11-based NX is).
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Even the netbook that's driving my FDM printer runs X clients remotely, very nicely and Cura displays its 3D renders from the netbook to the X desktop system just fine using OpenGL remote. By the way, the netbook has NO OpenGL hardware.
On that same X desktop machine every Linux Steam game that I've tried works without any problem.
You want to re-invent the wheel, go right ahead, don't let me stop you. Just quit trying to displace something that works amazingly well for everything I want with some spatch-cocked thing that you cooked up to scratch your own itches.
And stop making asinine claims that nobody wants to do what I do every day.
Then you are among those who will always complain about things that did not come from Microsoft.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
we don't lose backwards compatibility because we can host legacy X applications in a Wayland window using XWayland.
Come on man, don't be so disingenuous. That is a "true lie" - a technical truth about a similar-sounding issue intended to hide the truth about the real issue at hand. It isn't about "backwards compatibility" it is about network transparency. Most of the people bitching about wayland do so because of the lack of network transparency, not because of backwards compatibility.
When you can run a wayland app on a remote wayland display with good throughput and good latency - something that simple bit-blasting does not accomplish - then all the people will stop complaining. Hell, just come up with a spec for doing it so that there is a path forward and most people will stop bitching.
But going around telling true lies in order to muddy the waters, that doesn't help anyone and makes the people who do understand the technical issues doubt your sincerity.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
But if something is crap, I'll call it crap - i don't particularly care who is responsible for it. X11 is crap.
And KDE is crap, too, right? And XFCE. Gnome2 was also some unusable crap that you could never use. And everything else, except glorious Windows...
Oh please, be honest, tell us how you feel about everything that is not your comfortable, intuitive Microsoft desktop.
VNC is crap too, but performs somewhat better than X
VNC only performs better than X when used over high-latency lines, or if you have only seen X running on a live CD, with crippled drivers. Or, of course, if your "X" is actually some half-assedly done Windows-based X server.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I'm not quite sure where you get the idea that I'm a windows fan. I am platform agnostic and use whatever fits the purpose.
The only possible way for you to see worse X11 performance than everything else you mentioned, is by using Windows everywhere.
I'm actually a FreeBSD + Mac user at home a mixed environment (FreeBSD/Linux/vSphere/Windows) at work to pay the bills.
Yeah right. You have VM disk image with FreeBSD. Or had. Somewhere. Maybe.
None of my current platforms of choice can run Wayland, and currently on FreeBSD, X11 is the only option. It's still crap.
If that was true, you would not post this crap, or anything at all, in this thread. If you are not a Microsoft fanboy, you are their shill.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.