[Libdlo] tubecable 0.1 - a low-level library for Displaylink devices with compression support

[Steve (Endurance)]

On 30 May, Phil Endecott <spam_from_libdlo at chezphil.org> wrote:
> So what are we going to do with this?  Here are some possibilities, in 
> no particular order:
>
> - DisplayLink add this functionality to libdlo.
> - Someone else produces a patch that adds this to libdlo and it's 
> graciously accepted.
> - Someone else produces a patch and it's not accepted, and a 
> libdlo+compression fork is established somewhere else.
> - Roberto adds this to his framebuffer driver and everyone uses that 
> instead of libdlo.
> - Florian's library matures into something that has no disadvantages 
> compared to libdlo and everyone uses that instead.

This is all encouraging work and it certainly does offer an interesting
range of possibilities, as you've stated above.

Personally, I think there is value in having _both_ the framebuffer driver
code and some evolution of libdlo as separate entities, because the former
has obvious and general uses while the latter is a neat solution if a
specific application wants to output something onto a DisplayLink device (or
devices) - especially as it offers the possibility of having it run in user
space (which is interesting in its own right).

I'd be concerned about moving libdlo entirely away from libusb to using
ioctls directly (unless this was a build-time switch or something - because
there are obvious benefits to that approach, such as code size and
performance) because as previous posters have suggested, libusb is useful
for portability onto non-Linux platforms such as Windows. It's true that the
standard DisplayLink driver for Windows is clearly much better in the
general case than libdlo, there are probably some edge cases where a custom
solution built around libdlo would be desirable.

Ta,

Steve

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