Quote:
Originally Posted by aabramwow
It would be SO wonderful if the community would pick up this issue. ... Fingers crossed folks!
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It's not up to us. The USB2 devices were unencrypted, and the open source community was able to reverse engineer how to talk to the devices. The new USB3 devices are encrypted, and DisplayLink, after initially announcing USB3.0 devices with Linux support and advertising Linux support on the product pages, backpedaled, changed their product listings, and for two and a half years now has done absolutely nothing to give open source developers the starting place they need.
There have been some heroic attempts to hack the problem- keithp has been at it for a while (
example 1 example 2 pleading cry for help #3), but there's little sign that without some kind of help, we'll be able to get around the encrypted mess.
Meanwhile, USB-AV is an official USB specification that at one point community manager Dan
mentioned as a possible support target for future releases, but that was 2.5 years ago.
DisplayLink product manager Wim recently issued a quick teaser, saying
It would be useful to know which Linux distros would be the most popular for DisplayLink support first. It would be of course best if they released some open documentation to let the open source community take over; if DisplayLink drops a closed-source proprietary driver it will be of limited long term use, whereas if they help explore the protocol (what USB-AV would have been a clear win for), work like David Aerlie's
Reverse PRIME work would be able to be integrated ongoingly, we could experiment with what would make DisplayLink the best performing, most accessible across the broadest range of systems. But right now, and for the past three years (since USB3.0 product), there is no starting place for open source community, and there is no closed-source support.
Fingers crossed indeed, that we can start using the best multi-seat, multi-monitor platform on the planet with the best auxiliary/peripheral display hardware out there.