Wayland preview

Update: Daniel’s blog post here provides some more info, including how to install the technology preview on Raspbian today. And Pekka’s blog post here has some very detailed technical information on the implementation of the Weston backend.

If you’re familiar with the Raspberry Pi desktop experience, you’ll have noticed that windows on the desktop can be a bit slower to move around than you’re used to on your PC or laptop. This is because X, the windowing software (or composition protocol) that we use, is not optimised to use the graphics core of the BCM2835, the chip at the heart of the Raspberry Pi. All the work is done by the ARM processor instead, which slows things down and leaves the graphics core twiddling its thumbs. That graphics core is extremely powerful, so we’re working on putting it to good use to fix the issue.

We’ve made the decision to bypass X completely. Over the past few months we’ve been working with our friends at Collabora to implement the open-source Wayland composition protocol on top of the BCM2835 hardware video scaler (HVS). The HVS is a very powerful piece of hardware, with 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.

Wayland composited desktop with XWayland and native applications.

In comparison to our current X11 desktop environment, Wayland frees the ARM from the burden of stitching together the top level of the composition hierarchy, and allows us to provide some neat features, including non-rectangular windows, fades for windows which don’t have input focus and an Exposé-like scaled window browser (the sort of thing that Mac users will be familiar with). Legacy X applications can still be supported using XWayland. Check out this video from Collabora to see these features in action, and to compare the current state of affairs with the Wayland future. Those non-rectangular shapes? They’re also windows.

We’re still working to improve performance and memory consumption, and don’t expect to be able to replace X11 as our default desktop environment until later in the year, but we will be including a technology preview in our next Raspbian release. Until then, this post on Collabora’s website gives some more background.

As with PyPy, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has funded this work on Wayland; it’s one of the ways we are trying to give back to the open-source community. Obviously, much of the work on this particular project is Raspberry Pi specific, but there’s a large portion of what’s being done, particularly around XWayland and some of the generic effects in Weston, that can be reused on many other platforms.

We’re looking forward to being able to push out the full release in the next few months. We hope you like the look of it!

134 comments

ppp avatar

Looks good. As long as you can turn off the annoying animations that seem so prevalent nowadays. If I click on something, I want it to just appear. No fading, no sliding, no stretching.
By all means have all that headache inducing nonsense, but let those of us who use computers for work turn it off.
Or even better disable it at compilation time to save some MB.

liz avatar

How *are* the teeth of that gift horse looking? Thank the lord for open-source dentistry.

tai viinikka avatar

Liz, what you say is true, but a gift horse is a terrible present for someone who doesn’t like horses!

liz avatar

I don’t know. You could fettle yourself a lifetime’s supply of Findus lasagne from one – and *everybody* likes lasagne.

SnowHillIsland avatar

Not only does everyone like lasgne, but this may have eased the way somewhat to porting Wayland over to other cheap Arm based computers. This gift horse may well feed others, rather than just Raspberry lasagne eaters. Saying that, long live the Raspberry Pi!

Max avatar

I love your comment about the lasagne – I see you in a wholly different light now :-)

Anonymous avatar

I don’t like lasagne – specially that hard, toasted cheese. Munch that.

I do, however, have very good eyes for that incoming open-source horse goodness.

Jim Manley avatar

Liz, perhaps your isolation in Nippon has prevented you from seeing the preview of the reaction from the Nerdocracy when I clumsily attempted to pass on the good news in my sleep-deprived state around 4 AM local Sunday during the SF Faire weekend. I hope to be able to add at least some small demonstration of the advantages of this technology via my Pi-finity! STEM game system, even if it’s received as yet-another good deed that doesn’t go unpunished (I have no idea whether I got the multiple negatives right and frankly, I don’t give a rat’s posterior, Nerdocracy! :ugeek: ).

Maybe someday it will get through some incredibly thick skulls that the Pi was developed for students and their educators, not people who should be wasting their time elsewhere commenting on their adoration of “reality” TV or whatever it is those people think is actually cool. I’m not holding my breath though, as I don’t look good in blue skin (other than to complement my incredible baby blues, of course :lol:).

RobV avatar

Jim, could you try using more full stops? I have to take breaths just reading your posts

:-)

Wobbulator avatar

It’s a fantastic improvement, but I think the point that was not so well made by the other poster is that the transition effects on the windows appearing and closing in the video are masking the improvement in snappiness.

I’m sure there will be a config option to shut it of if it’s not what a user wants.

Anentropic avatar

because you can never have too many config options:
http://limi.net/checkboxes-that-kill/

ppp avatar

Hmm, I guess you took that the wrong way. With computers in general nowadays, manufacturer X tells you “this is the new interface. You will like the new interface. No, you can’t change it. You should change.”
The great thing (for me) about the Raspberry Pi is the user has control. You can do whatever you want with it. If you don’t like something, and there’s a way to change it, then change it, although this is true for Linux in general. Optimisation is a big deal, and even more so on the Pi. Getting it to do exactly what you want does involve making sure it’s not doing anything unnecessary. Which is why Wayland looks very interesting.
So no, not trying to criticise. Just commenting.

Gordon avatar

There’s a power button

Chris avatar

The Raspberry Pi is the gift that keeps on giving. :-)

Having a smooth desktop UI makes a huge difference to the perception and usability of the platform.

Looking forward to using this when its fully baked.

Corbin Davenport avatar

Will this be backwards-compatible with the 256MB Raspberry Pi Model B?

liz avatar

Yes. All the work’s being done by the GPU.

Funar avatar

Bravo! Funding development like this is such a clever move for the foundation. This goes way beyond what I expected and is really a game changer. Projects like this take the Raspberry Pi to another level altogether. Thanks to all who make things like this happen and we should not take them for granted!

Elbert avatar

Wow!
Can’t wait to try this?
Any plans on making this available for beta/alpha testing soon(ish)?
And +1 on the 512 vs 256 mb question. Although I assume this should work on both

liz avatar

We’ll be including a technology preview in the next Raspbian update.

Mr Floppy avatar

Excellent! I saw the build instructions on the wayland site but would have procrastinated long enough until the next Raspbian updata anyway

InverseSandwich avatar

I’m assuming the next Raspbian update will have NOOBS on it?

liz avatar

I couldn’t *possibly* say. :D

JBeale avatar

That is an impressive improvement!

Mace Moneta avatar

What was the gpu_mem set to for the demo? 64MB (default)?

Mark Fletcher avatar

That is… amazing!

Well done to everyone involved! Will there be a beta we can try out?

tzj avatar

X-elent!

Everyone on the MagPi team especially ones that do layouts will love this!

If you want to wait…
http://raspberrypi.collabora.com/

tzj avatar

* if you DON’T want to wait…

andrum99 avatar

OK, did that. Now how do I run it?

meltwater avatar

I get a NO_PUBKEY error. Currently trying to resolve it.

meltwater avatar

Like all good errors ignored it and carried on.
Run with commandline:
weston

Although it complained about XDG_RUNTIME_DIR.
mkdir /tmp/wayland
chmod 0700 /tmp/wayland
XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/tmp/wayland

Seemed to fix it.

meltwater avatar

scratch that…no dice.

tzj avatar

At least you were close :)

I suppose the compile option is the only option for now.

asb avatar

Yeah, Daniel Stone said yesterday the package in the Collabora is slightly out of date. His latest package should include a weston-launch script to work out of the box. Hopefully it should go live soon.

meltwater avatar

Did see the desktop briefly, but no mouse. Version I ended up with is 1.1.0
____
My own fault for not waiting for it to be made ready! :)

Larry avatar

I followed the 3 steps and when I rebooted, I got partly through boot when I got hard I/O errors reading the SD card. So I re imaged the SD card back to the latested rpi wheezy. Using 32GB SD card by Sandisk

Doug Taylor avatar

I installed the demo and promptly got lots of file system errors on my SD card. Fixed them with fsck on another computer, but the system was unusable after that — no desktop, no internet. Had to re-image the system.

(This isn’t a slam against Weston, which I’m looking forward to trying. Just reporting what happened.)

Peter avatar

File system errors on the SD card can be caused by a bad SD card. fsck doesn’t check the storage media itself, only the structure of the file system on top of the storage media.

Running non-destructive badblocks across the card can tell you if all bytes are readable. If you are working with a card you can afford to erase, then badblocks writing patterns on your SD card will detect a garbage card. I had to do that when one of my SD cards was behaving oddly.

breaker avatar

Excellent news, all Linux distros should be this interested in performance.

wallarug avatar

When can we expect to see a Hardware accelerated GUI?

This seems like a bandage fix to the actual problem: ‘No hardware accelerated GUI’.

Great work anyway on improving speed. Any improvement is good.

tzj avatar

AFAIK, the current raspbian IS hardware accelerated…

However, the current acceleration is done by the arm processor, where as the new Wayland uses the videocore processor.

eben avatar

Um. This *is* a hardware accelerated UI. That’s why it looks so good :)

liz avatar

You’re too nice. I was leaving that unanswered as flamebait. ;)

ukscone avatar

still no wheels and a sandwich though. i won’t be satisfied until we get that. well that and a black & gold pcb encrusted with diamonds and rubies

typ.o avatar

I definitively WANT this! Used the Pi headless only so far cause of the laggy look and feeol of the GUI, but this is awesome.

Kthx for your work

Rostislav LIBER avatar

Does this new environment have any implications for internet browsing ?

portets avatar

Once Midori or another browser gets a native Wayland port, the interface should be very smooth and quick. Scrolling, etc. But page load times should only improve a small amount.

If webkitgtk+ hardware acceleration gets ported, it’ll further improve interface responsiveness and slightly improve page load times further.

portets avatar

Almost forgot the most important improvement to having this acceleration. Pages will almost always be responsive and scroll smoothly, even while pages are loading. This’ll make the browser seem much faster.

Rostislav LIBER avatar

My first idea was use Raspberry Pi as computer for quick internet browsing. (It is not useful to wait for booting of PC due to reading of one e-mail.) Unfortunatelly, browsing internet is incredibly slow with my Raspberry Pi model B even if it is connected to 40Mb/s line. Wayland seems to help me to reach my idea :-)

pipo avatar

If you’d use RISC OS which uses the same Netsurf as the one on Raspian then browsing would be a much more enjoyable experience. RISCOS is very fast (even unaccelerated).

Rostislav LIBER avatar

Unfortunately, my mouse (https://www.hama.com/00053818/hama-rf-2200-set-wireless-keyboard-and-mouse-) does not work under this OS :-( Any help is appreciated. Please feel free to contact me on the forum.

Karl avatar

Does anyone know why it’s called wayland? I have always wondered.

Its good when development is done FOR the hardware and not the other way around like it usually is with regular pc’s. Why optimise code when CPU and RAM is so cheap!

bzar avatar

Wikipedia is your friend:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland_%28display_server_protocol%29
‘The name “Wayland” comes from the town of Wayland, Massachusetts. Høgsberg was driving through that town when the concepts behind Wayland “crystallized”.’

Lutz avatar

and Weston is a town right next to Wayland (ironically, east of it). Bloody expensive, too.

Dave Akerman avatar

My application doesn’t have a UI, let alone a GIU, but even *I* think it’s cool :-)

Jim Manley avatar

Is Collabora providing a Weston remote client for the Pi that would allow for optimally-fast trans-network sessions of desktop GUI elements? I’m looking forward to trying out some remote display of 3-D objects in Wayland windows on a second Pi (or other remote Wayland-capable platform) where the descriptions of Open GL ES objects within the windows are passed over the network for local GPU rendering rather than simply passing way-too-many window content pixels at an unsatisfactory frame rate. That was always what I had hoped to be able to do in my Pi-finity! STEM game system and Wayland/Weston should make this feasible.

Robert McQueen avatar

Wayland has no inherent network transparency – it’s a local protocol for getting windows onto the screen: http://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_8

There is a prototype RDP framebuffer-based remoting protocol in Wayland, but note that with XWayland, normal X network remoting can be used as-is.

Sending GL command streams over the network doesn’t work that well in practice because of round trips and the delays of things like accessing texture memory etc.

manuti avatar

Ohhh damm my headless pi without Remote Desktop.

Tim avatar

I imagine it will, but will Wayland be available to Pi users running other Linux distros (I’m using Arch on mine)?

Also, does Wayland “mind” which WM or DE it works with? I’d guess not, if it replaces the current X implementation, but I’m very keen to give Wayland a whirl when the time comes :-)

Many thanks – great news!

Tim

liz avatar

Yes, if the people running those distros choose to do the work to integrate it.

daniels avatar

The renderer work (though not all of the effects) are already upstream, so if you can build Weston from git master then you’ll get most of it.

X11 WMs and DEs don’t work automatically with Wayland, they need some porting. But aside from that, it’s environment-agnostic.

edwinj85 avatar

Looks like I’m going to have to buy yet another pi as my current two units run XMBC and a Minecraft server I’m loath to give up.

The idea of getting rid of the loud, old and power hungry old desktop pc running puppy linux under the stairs to make way for a pi is just too tempting though. I can’t wait until you release this fully. It’s amazing that the same chipset from the Roku 2 can be pushed to do so many amazing things from 1080p video to a full fat desktop.

Bim avatar

Awesome! I’ve really been waiting for this. X currently feels so sluggish on the Pi, even when overclocked and doesn’t even look good…

johnbanks avatar

This looks like very good news for improving the performance ‘feel’ of Thin Clients – and they are important in schools – particularly the Linux Terminal Server Project LTSP. However effectively interfacing RPi with LTSP does seem a bit tricky tho’. Or have I got the wrong end of the stick?

Robert McQueen avatar

You can use networked X clients as-is with XWayland acting as the X server and window manager. I guess it’s not quite the same as a stock LTSP set-up as the window manager is running locally, but you could probably figure out a way to make it work.

exartemarte avatar

Looks really good. Creating smart (and free!) software to get the best use out of inexpensive hardware is a Good Thing – for users, for the environment and for the parts of the world where they can’t afford the expensive options. Well done the Foundation!

Vanfanel avatar

Impressive!! I’ve been avoiding X on the Pi because it’s unusable and irritating for a lighweight-lover like me. I’m a commandline junkie, so I could live without a desktop enviroment as it’s not needing for vim, gcc or gdb (and the Pi has the great, accelerated dispmanx backend for graphics without X11, too!), but this wayland stuff shows how hardware and software integration can benefit a device with a smart design as the Raspberry Pi. Just like on the Amiga, desktop stuff was originally handled by the custom chips. Way to go!!!

don isenstadt avatar

this looks great! I wonder how much improvement I will see with midori? I assume this will be an addition to raspbian? or will it require another distro? can I switch between x11 and wayland?

portets avatar

Midori probably won’t load pages much faster. A little though. Scrolling should be a bit smoother if run as a Wayland application using the GTK3 and webkit2 backends. X11 apps should run through a kind of compatibility layer, right there within Wayland.

Robert McQueen avatar

Gtk WebKit isn’t fully ported to WebKit so running Midori as a native Wayland app won’t be possible as yet. There are a bunch of pieces to handle: getting GL set up for Accelerated Composition, getting overlays set up for HTML5 video, and for WebKit 2 you need a way to pass graphics between the rendering process and the UI process.

Collabora has been working on Wayland Subsurfaces which are needed for most of those – so one WebKit app window can set up different surfaces for eg the GL accelerated composition, video, etc and Wayland can composite them all. But it needs quite a bit more work in WebKit to make use of it.

portets avatar

What desktop environment will be used with Wayland? I assume Gnome 3, because it seems to be the closest to Wayland support.

Robert McQueen avatar

At present it’s the very simplistic desktop shell implemented by Weston (the reference implementation of Wayland). GNOME has aggressive plans to port to Wayland by later in the year but to benefit directly from this work they would need a Raspberry Pi renderer/backend in the same way we’ve added one to Weston. However, GNOME3 uses GL composition in the shell so this might be pretty tricky. You could port bits of LXDE or XFCE over to Wayland either on top of or alongside Weston – LWDE / WFCE? :)

meltwater avatar

Looks fantastic, and great to see that GPU getting something to do (first the camera and now the desktop), all that untapped power. No doubt the guys who worked so it are chuffed, I know it is used in other things but must be annoying otherwise not being used to its full power.

How will this effect using things like X11-forwarding, as I typically use the Raspberry Pi headless. (I am hoping it will still work, if not speed it up).

Something about having a fixed platform allows for the software to catch up and do impressive things with a lot less. Brings to mind Mr Braben & Co. shoehorn of Elite into 80’s hardware.

Robert McQueen avatar

This won’t affect X11-forwarding at all – if your app is remote, XWayland looks like a normal X server so stuff will works as usual – you will get your remote app scaled/composited/etc on the Pi a little quicker. If your app is on the Pi and you’re displaying it to a remote X server, it will work precisely as it is now, but this work won’t help you at all – it only speeds things up when the Pi is putting stuff on it’s screen.

Geordie Birch avatar

How do you use it? I added the apt source and installed weston.
It starts up and there is an icon for weston-terminal, but clicking on it does nothing at all.
What am I missing?

portets avatar

If you logout does it allow you to choose the session type?

Geordie Birch avatar

I haven’t been able to log out or do anything at all with it, other than move the mouse around and hover over the two icons.

I kill it by logging in from another machine and running “killall weston”

Tonight and tomorrow I’ll get a chance to dig deeper into it.

It sure looks good on the monitor… Thanks to those responsible…

jrmedd avatar

I have the same question as meltwater, so in case you missed it:

How will this effect using things like X11-forwarding, as I typically use the Raspberry Pi headless. (I am hoping it will still work, if not speed it up).

svenn avatar

not as straight forward, but possible : http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1731739

meltwater avatar

“not as straight forward, but possible” humm, never a good start to answer… It isn’t particularly clear if it will just work as is (just routed via Wayland) or have to install X11 on top…

I know the true answer will probably be try it and find out…but wondering if someone else has yet.

Stewart Watkiss avatar

If it’s a case of running X.org as a Wayland client then it’s probably not worth it for the Pi. The increase in memory from running both would likely outweigh the performance benefits of running Wayland.

The alternative for those that must have x-forwarding is just to stick with X.org. That will mean maintaining the x.org packages in the repositories, but they wouldn’t need to be installed for most users.

For the majority and in particular the target market (ie 8 to 18 year olds learning programming) then there is little benefit in learning X-forwarding, which will become a legacy protocol when the mainstream distros start moving to Wayland and as client applications drop . For those used to using X-forwarding then this is going to need a changing in working, but the performance improvement will hopefully outweigh that.

meltwater avatar

“little benefit in learning X-forwarding” But it “does” make it easy to use your laptop as a remote display for the RPi.

Not fussed about it having to be X11, but is a very useful function to have for workshops etc. and better alternative to VNC.

meltwater avatar

PS. I don’t intend to sound grumpy about it, it is great. Just getting a feel for what I need to change to get the best solutions.

Robert McQueen avatar

Not sure about this – even with remote X clients, the benefit of using the GPU for the 2D composition – moving windows around etc – has a massive impact on perceived responsiveness and usability. Its probably worth the RAM – and Weston is pretty small anyway.

Robert McQueen avatar

Actually a bit easier than this – X11 forwarding works normally with XWayland as it’s just the normal X server rendering to Wayland instead. So remote X11 clients displaying on the Pi will work and get the benefit of this accelerated 2D desktop composition.

The Ubuntu thread is looking at “native” Wayland clients running remotely, as X11 is a pretty lousy network transparency protocol. Wayland can support any other protocol for this though – there’s a prototype RFB-based protocol for Wayland so you can have a remote “native” Wayland app, but it’s not a priority for the developers.

meltwater avatar

Thank you for the answers!
A native Wayland client sounds even better.

Getting the GPU in the picture is a huge step forward. Look forward to trying it all out (and more importantly programming with it!).

mike632t avatar

I’m not as enthuastic about Wayland this as some people. An acellerated GUI is great news if you use the Pi with a screen an keyboard but if the idea is for Wayland to replace the X desktop this is going to make it harder to use X windows to access the desktop remotly.

Jim Manley avatar

The sooner people realize the Pi is not meant to be a Pixar/Dreamworks/PDI/etc., graphics rendering farm, the happier they will become. There’s a very good reason that the board has both an HDMI and composite output connectors on it – the BCM2835 system-on-a-chip (SoC) was originally developed for the Roku 2 series of Internet media streaming products, so the expected output is HDMI digital video and 5,1 surround sound or composite analog video and sound (the latter via the 3.5 mm audio jack).

That the Foundation volunteer engineers have been able to do so much with so little for so long is testament to how much their work needs to be appreciated, not deprecated. No one seems to complain that they can’t remotely stream 1080p video at full resolution and frame rate beyond a LAN from a netbook that costs 10 times as much as the Pi, much less full-on laptops or desktops that often have the same limitation, often also because of network issues (and assuming non-encrypted content).

svenn avatar

Waw, great job guys! Looks really smooth; Its nice that the foundation optimizes instead of bringing “hardware upgrades”. At least now I get the feeling you can pull out everything out of this computer;

I’m not sure but this will propably be very interesting for XMBC’s aswell ? or do they use alternative to X ?

Robert McQueen avatar

Probably won’t affect XMBC a lot as this is focused more on a typical desktop set-up – they don’t use windows on a desktop as it’s a full-screen app. They might be able to use the same 2D APIs (DispManX) to accelerate certain things – or they might already do so.

JamesH avatar

I think XBMC already uses the GPU acceleration – as its using dispmanx as its ‘backend’ (which I think Wayland is doing)

Robert McQueen avatar

DispManX is both the way to get stuff on screen (basically the framebuffer API) as well as the way to access the more exciting composition / blending / scaling / etc features we’re using here. Our first port of Weston to Pi used DispManX to set up the screen but composited using GL – this time we’re doing both the set-up and the composition using DispManX. Just to say that using DispManX doesn’t immediately imply using hardware-accelerated 2D composition like we’re doing here. Not saying they’re not – I have no idea. :)

3xBackup's avatar

Will remote X windows applications still function ?

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ ifconfig eth0 | grep “inet addr”
inet addr:192.168.0.101 Bcast:192.168.0.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
pi@raspberrypi ~ $ ssh user@bigunixserver
user@bigunixserver ~ $ export DISPLAY=192.168.0.101:0.0
user@bigunixserver ~ $ /usr/bin/firefox &

asb avatar

See the penultimate paragraph of http://lwn.net/Articles/536862/ for a brief description of the Wayland approach to remoting.

Robert McQueen avatar

Should work pretty similarly as XWayland is just an X server at the end of the day – it supports UNIX, TCP etc sockets.

winkleink avatar

Will this help make Scratch more responsive or is that still something to be worked on?

Alex Eames (RasPi.TV) avatar

I installed the .deb last night and was quite surprised how fast scratch started up compared with the previous time I’d tried it.

Haven’t done much with scratch yet, so don’t know how fast it will actually run.

Dragging wndows around was painless though :)

Geordie Birch avatar

How did you get to actually run/use programs on it? I start it by running “weston” and it gives me a desktop but that’s all I have been able to do with it.

jameswhite avatar

Same here. Just a desktop with two icons and when I click them it’s just garbage, like the font is noise.

asb avatar

It doesn’t directly help client-side rendering of window contents. That’s something work such as ARMv6 pixman optimisations has helped with. Work has been and is being done on scratch. Try a `sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install scratch` to make sure you’re running the latest version, there’s been great progress.

winkleink avatar

Thanks. I did an upgrade last night of Raspbian but was running headless. I’ll try it out this weekend.

I did a Code Club so receiving 3 Raspberry Pis for the school. With Scratch running better the kids will really love it.

Again, thanks.

AndrewS avatar

Looks interesting and impressive performance, well done guys!

Would having LXDE or XFCE ported to use Wayland instead of X11 also provide additional speedups?

David Guest avatar

Looks really good … Can’t wait to try it.

Liz, you people are the best!!!!!

Jay avatar

Wow, glad I don’t run Linux on the Raspberry Pi. Throw away X and use new fangled Wayland, yay (or something)

Jim Manley avatar

As teh_orph discovered after a good chunk of a year working on it, X can’t effectively be hardware-accelerated on the Pi due to the X app legacy method of pushing pixels around. There are historical reasons for this going back to the MIT Project Athena work in the early 1980s, when bitmapped graphics were only a layer or two from both the user and the hardware. The world is much different now, with GPUs many times more powerful than the CPUs on many systems, to the point where the CPU on the Pi is little more than a traffic cop between the Ethernet port and USB bus and the GPU (even the Pi GPU boots from the SD card and then starts the CPU). The key is to do what makes the most sense on each of the specialized hardware components, and drawing vectors (including typeface outlines), 2-D areas, and 3-D surfaces at any scale at any moment is what the GPU does for a living. The Pi doesn’t have or need a 3+ GHz CPU and gobs of RAM to be useful as the educational tool it was designed to be. The Nerdocracy keeps projecting what requires that kind of horsepower onto the poor little board that costs a tenth or much less than a state-of-the-art system. Heavy doses of both reality as well as imagination are in order to get the most out of the Pi.

Ian avatar

Py-Py, now this and hints of much more to come , the Pi Foundation may be aimed at education, however the benefits you have also brought to the open source world are also fantastic. Big thank you from me for all your hard work.

Anton avatar

Is it somehow possible to use the DispManX from Python? I mean pass it some images, do some compositing and transformation and return the result back to Python?

Charles avatar

Thank you to everyone working on this. One of the aspects of the Raspberry Pi project is that there continues to be a strong drive to make the computer system as a whole better: faster, more functional, easier to use. Improvements have been coming fast and furious in the year since I first received my Model B, and I’m very much looking forward to trying out a Wayland-based GUI as well.

dan3008 avatar

well, that settles it, Raspien is my favorite distro lol

oztrailrider avatar

A big congratulations to the foundation for working on this. I think this will make the pi a lot more usable and improve general use performance for applications since the CPU will be freed up from doing the lifting in X. I can’t wait to try it out. The Pi has had so much improvement on the software side which shows just how much things can be improved with optimized code when you have limited hardware. Keep up the good work.

Peter Bauer avatar

I am happy to see Wayland coming to the Pi, I will try to do some tests and give some feedback. Keep on the good work.

OMightyBuggy avatar

Got this error after adding the source.

W: GPG error: http://raspberrypi.collabora.com wheezy Release: The following signatures couldn’t be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY ED4BF9140C50B1C5

OMightyBuggy avatar

Four days later no luck with getting keys. I hate errors on a computer even if it still works. >.<

Steve McCain avatar

I’m getting the same error. Have you been able to find any solution or workaround for this?

Love the Pi!

snowflake avatar

You can add key manually, by running this at console:

apt-key add - <<EOF1
-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.13 (GNU/Linux)

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EOF1

this seems work to me :)

Benfll avatar

I downloaded, installed, ran. And there is some huge stupid overscan, that I can’t find how to switch off, that cuts off all the buttons so I can’t use it.

ukscone avatar

you’ll need to modify the overscan values in your config.txt in /boot (1st partition on the sd card) or you can do it on the fly using https://github.com/ukscone/set_overscan

Benfll avatar

I ran the program but it only affected X and the terminal, not Weston/Wayland.

johnbanks avatar

How did you get it to run? I installed per Daniel Stone’s blog post and just ignored the request for a key. On trying to run weston, I got the error – environment variable XDG_RUNTIME_DIR is not set. Running weston -h produced a helpful looking list but it’s beyond me at this stage. (my Raspian & firmware is bang up to date). Any suggestions? Thx

scot avatar

Epic! A camera board, pypy and now this! Whats next? Faster than light communication with quantom entanglement? (: You people at the pi foundation never cease to amaze me.

William H. Bell avatar

This is great news. A few of us have followed the X acceleration thread and wondered if there was a better solution that was reachable. Looking forward to the next Raspbian update! Thanks and best regards, Will

horace avatar

awesome! :)

but i don’t understand the darkening of the background. for programming people often need two fully visible windows next to each other. (one with documentation, one with the editor,…)

scot avatar

Thats a good point, I personally use a small txt file full of python notes all the time. But yoy gotta admit it looks pretty stinkin’ cool.

Nick avatar

So this little beauty fruit, has two hardware accelerators; a HVS and OpenGL ES hardware.

Can either of these be the target of a compiler for us mere mortals? I’m particularly interested in using haskell with llvm for a project to plot 0.5M floating point complex numbers frame-1, though I don’t need a large frame rate.

Doing this on a RPi would be too B)

peter avatar

I would like to know more about this as well. If I install JOGL successfully, I will have a bunch of java functions that will work on the GPU right? No change to the operating system required, and “streaming” from the raspicam will be obvious?

In addition, I can do parallel math operations if I can map them into a representation of pixels and shader functions?

Any pointers to people doing this on a pi?

danoo avatar

Hey, this is really great news! I’m using RPI as a digital signage player running a chrome browser. The animations like sliding, fading and others are very slow.
I really hope this impacts this kind of experience and could improve the abilities as a signage player!

Jeroen avatar

Same thing here! I’m really looking forward to a GPU-accelerated Midori!

Daniel avatar

Good job guys, I’m a big fan of Wayland and Raspberry Pi, and now they’re together.
This is great.

sam_scribbler avatar

To whoever posted about using the Pi as a quick-check e-mail box…

I built a handheld unit from a Raspberry Pi, and I use Claws (or subsequently Sylpheed, if you prefer) to check my mail. Standards compliant web browsers will always be bulkier and slower than dedicated e-mail clients.

Typically, I can switch on my computer, have my mail checked (from a decent connection) and switch it back off in less than a minute. Two, tops.

If your e-mail service doesn’t allow this, then I totally understand, but if you have free POP3 and IMAP access, by all means, give it a shot.

Heiher avatar

Have Wayland EGL extenstion implemented?

Max avatar

We’ve pulled together the information we found on getting Wayland to work, this might be of some use to others, who asked how to get it to start at all:

http://blog.pi3g.com/2013/05/weston-and-wayland-on-the-raspberry-pi-a-first-look

Please note, that X applications do not work with out setup – the only thing you can start is the terminal.

OMightyBuggy avatar

Great info. :)

Serg avatar

i think you can add a key manually…

solar3000 avatar

Awwwwee it looks great.
WHEN???
HOW??
Don’t keep it a secret! Don’t be shy!

Sergio M avatar

WOW! This is so amazing. Thank you very much.

Comments are closed