DisplayLink Provides USB GPU Support On Linux

[phoronix]

Phoronix: DisplayLink Provides USB GPU Support On Linux

Besides Intel, VIA, and ATI/AMD cooperating with X.Org and Linux developers by providing source code and documentation to help with the enablement of their hardware under Linux, another major company has come to the open-source table. No, sadly it is not NVIDIA...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=NzI3NA

[Ant P.]

What advantage does this have over the existing USB display adapters Linux supports?

[ivazquez]

90%+ of the USB video adapters available are DisplayLink, not SiS.

[deanjo]

What advantage does this have over the existing USB display adapters Linux supports?
Nothing really, they all are pretty much garbage adapters. Only really useful if your needing a second display for basic stuff like a webbrowser on a second screen.

[sal-e]

Correction, the code is released under LGPLv2 not GPLv2.

[drag]

Nothing really, they all are pretty much garbage adapters. Only really useful if your needing a second display for basic stuff like a webbrowser on a second screen.

Man.

You have _zero_ imagination. :P :)

I am always looking at fun things to hack with.

So with USB video devices you have severe limits on the available bandwidth. So that means for decent performance you looking at about 1024x768 display size with 16bit graphics.

Not a huge barn stormer.

But they are fun things non-the-less.

you could use these devices for things like:

Linux handhelds
Linux ARM boards like Gumstix or Beagleboard
Carputers
Status display for your server

Add a touch screen overlay and you can do weird things like...

Ultra-fancy controller for your Home Theater setup. (there are decent touch screen input devices you can build nice interfaces out of)


The USB 2.0 specification says you can have up to about 16 feet of cabling between you and your computer. You put a hub in there and you can double that, possibly.

Hell if you got money to burn you cuold get a dozen of those USB adapters and do weird things... maybe make a light wall or something

I busted the LCD on a old laptop.. it would make a perfect little car media system if I could use of those USB video adapters. Little 800x600 vga screens can be had for reasonable prices nowadays. Just velco the VGA adapter to the back and make a custom cable and your set. It can literally be placed anywere inside of a car. Would be fun for road trips.

[bugmenot]

Nice! I am not sure if I will ever need it, but it's great that it's opensource. :) Thank you

michael:
on opentheblob.com is much spam in the last months. what about putting everything that has [url=http or [link=http: inside in a second list and remove from that list all spam? if there are any on spam messages (i doubt it) put them pack. A clean list would certainly more professional. Thanks. :)

[krogy]

you could use these devices for things like:

Linux handhelds


that. i'd love to be able to do presentations around without the need to carry any laptop.

[cruiseoveride]

USB:Video is a USB standard. It would be quite retarded if their DisplayLink stuff didn't work.

I think Matrox was the first to come out with USB Video devices

[tettamanti]

What advantage does this have over the existing USB display adapters Linux supports?
This is not about video cards attached to the PC via USB (like SiS USB)[1]. DisplayLink technology allows to carry the video signal over a USB cable. The content of the screen is read from the framebuffer and sent over an USB cable to the monitors (which of course shall have a proper input).

[1] Yeah ok, you can also use that, but it's rather uninteresting (mainly for retro-compatibility).

[drag]

Ah. I did not know that.

That is very different from a USB video card... it's a USB _display_.

Very interesting.

Does the framebuffer need to be a real video card? Or can it be a software-driven thing?

[tettamanti]

Does the framebuffer need to be a real video card? Or can it be a software-driven thing?

I'm not sure. For a theoretical point of view it's possible, you just need a virtual video card to please the OS (_that_ one); in the embedded space the video subsystem is often just a chunk of system memory, with a DMA channel dedicated to sending the data off to the display controller; with DisplayLink only the last part would be different.
On desktop machine however you may want a real video card to accelerate the drawing operations (composition, spinning cubes...) ;)