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."

Comments

Re:wayland

[ebenupton]

As the video and Daniel's post explain, we don't lose backwards compatibility because we can host legacy X applications in a Wayland window using XWayland. We get all of the benefits of doing top-level composition in hardware, none of the pain of writing (and maintaining) a hardware-accelerated X driver. Can you explain why anyone starting from a clean slate today would chose to accelerate X itself instead?

Re:Replaces hardware lag with animation lag

[ebenupton]

Yup. We know lots of people don't love the shiny (or love the speed more than the shiny), so we'll be providing the ability to turn off fades and scaled window browsing. Disabling fades has the nice side effect of removing 120Mpixels/s of blending, so you can have more windows on the screen before the back of the stack falls back to 30fps (for responsiveness the front of the stack will always run at 60fps regardless of scene complexity).

Re:wayland

[smash]

If you've been using Linux since 1.0 (I have since 1.2) and have never seen any X11 failings, you're either talking out of your arse or are completely blinded by unrelenting fanboy-ism.

I've seen plenty of X11 failings over the years, ranging from inability to change screen resolution on the fly for about the first decade, poor security, crashes in the video driver taking down the OS, various hacks to get things like multi-monitor or 3d support to work, etc.

Yes, some of those things have been "fixed" via various bodges, in much the same way that the average wannabe Nissan Silvia drifter will "fix" crash damage with a drill and some cable-ties.

High latency, low bandwidth, high security risk stuff like network transparency does not belong in the same process as the rendering engine. It certainly doesn't want to be running as root. Especially when the majority of people simply do not use it, and it can easily be retained via a daemon like every other platform uses.