DisplaylinkManager: Hive format not recognized

[cid]

Hi,

I've tried the displaylink driver 1.0.138 on my Arch Linux box with kernels 3.18, 4.1 and 4.2 but the DisplaylinkManager crashes everytime a few seconds after starting with the following error message:


terminate called after throwing an instance of 'dl::sys::Failure'
what(): Hive format not recognised


What does this mean? Any help are welcome.

Regards,
Cid

[Szymon]

Hello cid,

Thanks for contacting. If you could verify first if your setup meets the requirement listed here:
http://support.displaylink.com/knowledgebase/articles/684649-how-to-install-displaylink-software-on-ubuntu

This possibly might help. If you still see the problem please gather logs as described in this article:
http://support.displaylink.com/knowledgebase/articles/757047

and then attach the zip replying to this thread.

Thanks,
Szymon

[deztructor]

Everything is quite simple: the reason is the bug in the DisplayLinkManager binary blob, it creates /root/.dl.xml once (resembling m$ windows registry hive?) and doesn't validate it properly later as also does not catch exceptions, just aborts. So, if it saved empty /root/.dl.xml, it fails. The workaround is to delete this file before running DisplayLinkManager. Also, it will help in the case if usb tree structure is changed and it can't find displays.

There is also a second bug in the driver, frequently preventing xrandr from being executed. DPI resolution is improperly set to the totally wrong value (minimal signed 32-bit integer value) and xrandr doesn't check the DPI value validity and aborts with FPE.