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
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 12:45:45 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
1 sourcesFRfranga2000·Jan 19, 2021
Love 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