24 May 2013

Weston on Raspberry Pi Accelerated

Raspberry Pi is a nice tiny computer with a relatively powerful VideoCore graphics processor, and an ARM core bolted on the side running Linux. Around October 2012 I was bringing Wayland to it, and in November the Weston rpi-backend was merged upstream. Unfortunately, somehow I did not get around to write about it. In spring 2013 I did a follow-on project on the rpi-backend for the Raspberry Pi Foundation as part of my work for Collabora. We are now really pushing Wayland forward on the Raspberry Pi, and strengthening Collabora's Wayland expertise on all fronts. In the following I will explain what I did and how the new rpi-backend for Weston works in technical terms. If you are more interested in why this was done, I refer you to the excellent post by Daniel Stone: Weston on Raspberry Pi.