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Replacing X With Wayland On The Raspberry Pi

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  • Replacing X With Wayland On The Raspberry Pi

    Phoronix: Replacing X With Wayland On The Raspberry Pi

    Last week I wrote about the emergence of a new Wayland Weston compositor renderer for the Raspberry Pi. There was a fair amount of discussion about it and since then additional details have emerged...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    I don't see why not, it's not like there's many X-specific programs that RPi can run anyway. Considering the popularity of the device, this might make wayland gain some much needed traction.

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    • #3
      Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't server side composition on ARM devices one of the alleged reasons for Mir?

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      • #4
        Originally posted by oleid View Post
        Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't server side composition on ARM devices one of the alleged reasons for Mir?
        You're wrong: it was about server side management(allocation) of buffers.

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        • #5
          Originally posted by renox View Post
          You're wrong: it was about server side management(allocation) of buffers.
          Yes, this is what I meant The composition is of course always on the server's side....

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          • #6
            It's quite remarkable just how bad X really is in comparison to Wayland. I saw a few demos on modern machines and read some dry numbers over the years about the locks and the cost of the compositions on the cpu, but seeing it like this really makes a difference.

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            • #7
              The ironic thing is that this could allow you to run X applications with far better performance with XWayland. In fact, I remember seeing someone running a full KDE desktop inside an XWayland 'window' of sorts at some point. In essence, Wayland could give way to running the full usual X environments on the Pi with X as a client. Correct me if I'm wrong, or if it's quite a bit more complicated than I'm making it sound.

              Still, the graphics issues are the only reason I'm not testing these boards out. I really want to see how productive you can get with one of these before hitting a barrier, and false limitations like poor drivers/display technology should hardly be a reason to underestimate these little jitterbugs.

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              • #8
                The only reason i have not bought a rpi is because they don't have the drivers opensource. It really boggles my mind why a teaching/school board like this is bundled with proprietary graphics drivers which essentially is a big black box denying the students access to much functionality of the stack.

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                • #9
                  Originally posted by varikonniemi View Post
                  The only reason i have not bought a rpi is because they don't have the drivers opensource. It really boggles my mind why a teaching/school board like this is bundled with proprietary graphics drivers which essentially is a big black box denying the students access to much functionality of the stack.
                  I would guess it's because they could get it cheaply. Their focus was to introduce people to programming by showing them scratch and python. I doubt anybody is expecting pupils at school to be hacking on hardware drivers (awesome though that would be).

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                  • #10
                    Not really

                    Originally posted by c117152 View Post
                    It's quite remarkable just how bad X really is in comparison to Wayland.
                    Note that recently Weston's implementation has been totally replaced on the Raspberry Pi with a *specific backend* with much improved performance, so Wayland allow great local performance (at a trade-off of potentially worse network usage in remote desktop) but you have to work for it!

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