Commenters criticize Synaptics for issuing a cease-and-desist letter against DisplayLink open-source drivers, characterizing the action as extortionate and legally incoherent. The community argues the patents are likely invalid due to obvious prior art and that the lawsuit harms consumers by restricting free software development.
280 readable replies · Supporting reply 1 · Supporting reply 2 · Supporting reply 3 · Supporting reply 4DisplayLink
evdi
C2021–2025
DisplayLink / evdi
evdi
Extensible Virtual Display Interface
4Distinct people
5Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
965GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Extensible Virtual Display Interface
GitHub
Where it is used
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year5 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2021-01-19 09:32:24 UTC to 2025-06-16 07:23:17 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
5 sourcesMLmlukaszek·Jun 16, 2025
Have a look at https://github.com/DisplayLink/evdi and (shameless plug, toy project, be gentle) https://github.com/mlukaszek/evdipp
In Modifying an HDMI dummy plug's EDID using a Raspberry PiIf I understand your goal correctly, would EVDI (Extensible Virtual Display Interface) not be a possibility for you?
EVDI allows to create "virtual heads", that you could then conceivably cast to external displays via `miraclecast`, VNC, etc.
It was originally created to support some ancient USB graphics card, but can be used independently off any specific hardware.
https://github.com/DisplayLink/evdi
In MiracleCast – Wifi-Display/Miracast ImplementationIf you haven't already checked it out, I'd suggest investigating use of `evdi` ("Extensible Virtual Display Interface") for the virtual display aspect of this:
* https://github.com/DisplayLink/evdi
* https://github.com/rhofour/evdi-vnc
In Using a Linux phone as a secondary monitorThat's exactly where my mind went when I read this post too.
The link for anyone interested: https://github.com/DisplayLink/evdi
It's unfortunate it wasn't accepted in-tree because while it was initially developed for a specific commercial product, I do think it has the potential to be generically useful.
The ability to conjure up a display "in software" & then just have the rest of the system automatically treat it as any other physical display is pretty powerful.
There's a couple of projects on my long "projects to do" that would make use of it...
In The smallest and worst HDMI displayLove the project as I currently don't have a way of doing this on Linux, but there is no way I'm using those dumb plugs.
On Windows there is SpaceDesk, which actually contains a proper virtual display driver and so doesn't need any of those dumb plugs.
Does anyone know of a Linux kernel module that would acomplish that? There's X11-specifc solutions and Weston has a config option for this, but I would absolutely love to be able to just load a kernel module that I could pass a number of displays and their resolutions and it would pop them up seamlessly, just as if I plugged in a display adapter.
EDIT: I did find evdi [0], but it's broken for the kernel I'm using. Does anyone have any experience with it?
[0] https://github.com/DisplayLink/evdi
In I made Deskreen, open source app to make any device a second screen for computer