No effect setting lcd_rotate = 1 (or 3) in config.txt

[Justine Haupt]

System: Raspbian Stretch with desktop environment, kernel 4.9, on a Raspberry Pi 3 with the official Raspberry Pi 7" Touchscreen or with a third-party touchscreen.

Intent: Rotate the display and touch interface 90 degrees.

Issue: Setting lcd_rotate = 1 (or 3) in /boot/config.txt (then rebooting) neither rotates the display nor the touch interface. Disabling the GL driver via the configuration tool has no effect. Rotating *just* the display by setting display_rotate = 1 (or 3) does work.

Problem with workaround: The coordinates of the pointer device can be remapped with xinit when using the official touchscreen, which appears as "FT5406 memory based driver" in the output of lsusb. However, xinit does not recognize the device associated with a third-party touchscreen, which appears as "Elan Microelectronics Corp." in the output of lsusb.

[Cameron Tacklind (cinderblock)]

Has no one found a better solution for this in the last 2 years? The official documentation makes no reference to if these other values are reasonable or not: https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/config-txt/video.md (under lcd_rotate)

> This flips the display using the LCD's inbuilt flip functionality, which is a cheaper operation that using the GPU-based rotate operation.
>
> For example, lcd_rotate=2 will compensate for an upside down display.

Is the only real solution to use X to remap the touch screen inputs?