Plugable

udlfb 0.4.0

[Update Dec 29, 2011: udlfb was promoted from the staging to the mainline kernel tree in 2.6.38. And in kernel 3.3 pagefault detection and console are enabled by default. See all our udlfb posts for the latest news.]

[Update March 14, 2010: udlfb versions have moved to being released with the Linux kernel. Update on udlfb support in Linux kernel 2.6.34]

[Update Feb 6, 2010: additional features and fixes post-0.4 are available at the plugable git page. Background is in later posts. One major udlfb patch with these changes has made it into linux-next (slated for 2.6.34), and additional patches will be coming as they’re ready.]

This is a new release of the DisplayLink kernel framebuffer driver, udlfb.

udlfb was accepted into the Linux kernel staging tree of 2.6 a few months ago. It needs some work to add key features and get it moving from the staging tree, into mainline. Roberto De Iorio, the author of udlfb and displaylink-mod, is focusing on X server work, and is happy with this work happening in parallel to move udlfb forward.

This first release intentionally adds no fundamentally new features. It only gets udlfb up to sync with the displaylink-mod branch (up to Roberto’s last 0.3 release in July 2009) that has been in use the past few months. With this update, displaylink-mod users should be able to switch to this version of udlfb transparently.

Bug reports are very welcome, especially regressions or problems that would stand in the way of moving this driver forward out of staging (comments here are fine for bug reports).

New in 0.4.0 (since 0.2.3 currently in the Linux kernel staging tree)

Download

See the git project summary page at http://git.plugable.com/gitphp/index.php?p=udlfb&a=summary for information.

Switching from displaylink-mod to udlfb.

Both these drivers match against all displaylink devices. So you don’t want both loading on your system. To clear out displaylink-mod:

sudo rmmod displaylink
sudo rm /lib/modules/`uname -r`/extra/displaylink.ko
sudo depmod -a

Then download, compile, install udlfb 0.4

./configure
make
sudo make install
sudo depmod -a

Todo

Any feedback or ideas on these todos are very welcome. And, as always, patches are very welcome and will be incorporated as quickly as possible.