Wednesday 25 May 2016

Blog backlog, Post 3, DisplayLink-based USB3 graphics support for Fedora

Last year, after DisplayLink released the first version of the supporting tools for their USB3 chipsets, I tried it out on my Dell S2340T.

As I wanted a clean way to test new versions, I took Eric Nothen's RPMs, and updated them along with newer versions, automating the creation of 32- and 64-bit x86 versions.

The RPM contains 3 parts, evdi, a GPLv2 kernel module that creates a virtual display, the LGPL library to access it, and a proprietary service which comes with "firmware" files.

Eric's initial RPMs used the precompiled libevdi.so, and proprietary bits, compiling only the kernel module with dkms when needed. I changed this, compiling the library from the upstream repository, using the minimal amount of pre-compiled binaries.

This package supports quite a few OEM devices, but does not work correctly with Wayland, so you'll need to disable Wayland support in /etc/gdm/custom.conf if you want it to work at the login screen, and without having to restart the displaylink.service systemd service after logging in.


 Plugged in via DisplayPort and USB (but I can only see one at a time)


The source for the RPM are on GitHub. Simply clone and run make in the repository to create 32-bit and 64-bit RPMs. The proprietary parts are redistributable, so if somebody wants to host and maintain those RPMs, I'd be glad to pass this on.

2 comments:

Frank Ch. Eigler said...

Thanks a lot, this is working perfectly for me on my F23 Dell adapter (even connected to USB 2.0).

Bastien Nocera said...

@Frank: Happy that it's useful to you :)