[[!meta title="EXA"]]

EXA is a modern acceleration architecture for the X server. It
originally began its life as the acceleration mechanism in Keith
Packard's "kdrive" X servers, but was ported to Xorg by Zack
Rusin. EXA can be selected as the acceleration mechanism to be used by
the X server with the following directive in the xorg.conf file:

	# In the Device section, (might work elsewhere as well)
	Option	"AccelMethod"	"exa"

EXA is interesting to me since it provides the X device driver with
the opportunity to accelerate Render extension requests, (which
[cairo](http://cairographics.org) uses whenever possible when talking
to an X server.

Here are various posts I've made while measuring, evaluating, and
trying to improve EXA performance and various drivers.

Oh, and by the way, the cool people on the playground seem to
pronounce EXA as a two-syllable word as opposed to a three-letter
[initialism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym#Nomenclature). I
guess I'm just not that cool yet, because I still think "ee ex ay"
when I see "EXA"---maybe that's because I associate EXA with its
predecessor, XAA, (which doesn't afford a word-like
pronunciation). See also: Xorg pronounced as "zorg".

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