DisplayLink's Frame-buffer and X.Org Drivers

Last month we shared the news about DisplayLink providing USB GPU support under Linux that was open-source and backed by the company while the Linux drivers were being developed in conjunction with the Linux Driver Project. Today, on our birthday, they have released udlfb 0.2.2 and xf86-driver-displaylink 0.2. The udlfb is the DisplayLink Linux Frame-buffer driver while xf86-driver-displaylink is the accompanying X.Org driver for use with DisplayLink video devices.

New in the DisplayLink Linux driver world is preliminary support for double buffering to provide smooth video playback, RLE compression, real screen blanking, code refactoring to support 24-bit outputs (coming in the next release), and the X.Org driver should have reduced flickering on multiple damaged regions. Just three days ago was actually the first public release of this DisplayLink driver that is written by Italian programmer Roberto De Ioris. This driver currently lacks RandR support and various other features, but right now in fact the X.Org driver is just about 640 lines of code while the Linux kernel frame-buffer for it comes in at over 1,000 lines.

The release announcement along with a source download link for both Linux drivers can be found on the X.Org mailing list.