3D Rendering on DisplayLink Devices For Linux

Ilija Hadzic is a developer that proposed an interesting idea, with the help of some of his coleagues.

More precisely, the GPU driver can have an arbitrary number of CRTCs (configurable by user), instead of only those CRTCs that represent real hardware.

In principle, virtual CRTCs can be attached to a CTD device (Compression Transmission and Display) and pixels can be streamed out of the GPU to the device.

“In one example, we use AMD/ATI Radeon GPU to do 3D rendering (accelerated, of course) and we use our code to add additional monitor heads using DisplayLink devices. In other words, we achieve accelerated 3D rendering on a DisplayLink monitor”, said Ilija Hadzic.

The Github page of Ilija Hadzic can be found here. To access the kernel code type:

git clone git://github.com/ihadzic/linux-vcrtcm.git
git branch drm-next-vcrtcm origin/drm-next-vcrtcm
git checkout drm-next-vcrtcm