145 lines
6.5 KiB
Plaintext
145 lines
6.5 KiB
Plaintext
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What is udlfb?
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===============
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This is a driver for DisplayLink USB 2.0 era graphics chips.
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DisplayLink chips provide simple hline/blit operations with some compression,
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pairing that with a hardware framebuffer (16MB) on the other end of the
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USB wire. That hardware framebuffer is able to drive the VGA, DVI, or HDMI
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monitor with no CPU involvement until a pixel has to change.
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The CPU or other local resource does all the rendering; optinally compares the
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result with a local shadow of the remote hardware framebuffer to identify
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the minimal set of pixels that have changed; and compresses and sends those
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pixels line-by-line via USB bulk transfers.
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Because of the efficiency of bulk transfers and a protocol on top that
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does not require any acks - the effect is very low latency that
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can support surprisingly high resolutions with good performance for
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non-gaming and non-video applications.
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Mode setting, EDID read, etc are other bulk or control transfers. Mode
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setting is very flexible - able to set nearly arbitrary modes from any timing.
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Advantages of USB graphics in general:
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* Ability to add a nearly arbitrary number of displays to any USB 2.0
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capable system. On Linux, number of displays is limited by fbdev interface
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(FB_MAX is currently 32). Of course, all USB devices on the same
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host controller share the same 480Mbs USB 2.0 interface.
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Advantages of supporting DisplayLink chips with kernel framebuffer interface:
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* The actual hardware functionality of DisplayLink chips matches nearly
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one-to-one with the fbdev interface, making the driver quite small and
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tight relative to the functionality it provides.
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* X servers and other applications can use the standard fbdev interface
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from user mode to talk to the device, without needing to know anything
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about USB or DisplayLink's protocol at all. A "displaylink" X driver
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and a slightly modified "fbdev" X driver are among those that already do.
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Disadvantages:
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* Fbdev's mmap interface assumes a real hardware framebuffer is mapped.
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In the case of USB graphics, it is just an allocated (virtual) buffer.
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Writes need to be detected and encoded into USB bulk transfers by the CPU.
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Accurate damage/changed area notifications work around this problem.
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In the future, hopefully fbdev will be enhanced with an small standard
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interface to allow mmap clients to report damage, for the benefit
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of virtual or remote framebuffers.
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* Fbdev does not arbitrate client ownership of the framebuffer well.
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* Fbcon assumes the first framebuffer it finds should be consumed for console.
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* It's not clear what the future of fbdev is, given the rise of KMS/DRM.
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How to use it?
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==============
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Udlfb, when loaded as a module, will match against all USB 2.0 generation
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DisplayLink chips (Alex and Ollie family). It will then attempt to read the EDID
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of the monitor, and set the best common mode between the DisplayLink device
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and the monitor's capabilities.
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If the DisplayLink device is successful, it will paint a "green screen" which
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means that from a hardware and fbdev software perspective, everything is good.
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At that point, a /dev/fb? interface will be present for user-mode applications
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to open and begin writing to the framebuffer of the DisplayLink device using
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standard fbdev calls. Note that if mmap() is used, by default the user mode
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application must send down damage notifcations to trigger repaints of the
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changed regions. Alternatively, udlfb can be recompiled with experimental
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defio support enabled, to support a page-fault based detection mechanism
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that can work without explicit notifcation.
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The most common client of udlfb is xf86-video-displaylink or a modified
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xf86-video-fbdev X server. These servers have no real DisplayLink specific
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code. They write to the standard framebuffer interface and rely on udlfb
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to do its thing. The one extra feature they have is the ability to report
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rectangles from the X DAMAGE protocol extension down to udlfb via udlfb's
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damage interface (which will hopefully be standardized for all virtual
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framebuffers that need damage info). These damage notifications allow
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udlfb to efficiently process the changed pixels.
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Module Options
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==============
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Special configuration for udlfb is usually unnecessary. There are a few
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options, however.
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From the command line, pass options to modprobe
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modprobe udlfb defio=1 console=1
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Or for permanent option, create file like /etc/modprobe.d/options with text
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options udlfb defio=1 console=1
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Accepted options:
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fb_defio Make use of the fb_defio (CONFIG_FB_DEFERRED_IO) kernel
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module to track changed areas of the framebuffer by page faults.
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Standard fbdev applications that use mmap but that do not
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report damage, may be able to work with this enabled.
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Disabled by default because of overhead and other issues.
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console Allow fbcon to attach to udlfb provided framebuffers. This
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is disabled by default because fbcon will aggressively consume
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the first framebuffer it finds, which isn't usually what the
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user wants in the case of USB displays.
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Sysfs Attributes
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================
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Udlfb creates several files in /sys/class/graphics/fb?
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Where ? is the sequential framebuffer id of the particular DisplayLink device
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edid If a valid EDID blob is written to this file (typically
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by a udev rule), then udlfb will use this EDID as a
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backup in case reading the actual EDID of the monitor
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attached to the DisplayLink device fails. This is
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especially useful for fixed panels, etc. that cannot
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communicate their capabilities via EDID. Reading
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this file returns the current EDID of the attached
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monitor (or last backup value written). This is
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useful to get the EDID of the attached monitor,
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which can be passed to utilities like parse-edid.
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metrics_bytes_rendered 32-bit count of pixel bytes rendered
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metrics_bytes_identical 32-bit count of how many of those bytes were found to be
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unchanged, based on a shadow framebuffer check
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metrics_bytes_sent 32-bit count of how many bytes were transferred over
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USB to communicate the resulting changed pixels to the
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hardware. Includes compression and protocol overhead
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metrics_cpu_kcycles_used 32-bit count of CPU cycles used in processing the
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above pixels (in thousands of cycles).
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metrics_reset Write-only. Any write to this file resets all metrics
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above to zero. Note that the 32-bit counters above
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roll over very quickly. To get reliable results, design
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performance tests to start and finish in a very short
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period of time (one minute or less is safe).
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--
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Bernie Thompson <bernie@plugable.com>
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