Random power cycling
 

I just updated to OS X 10.11.3 and made sure to install the new DisplayLink 2.5 driver on a 2012 Macbook Pro.

Now, seemingly randomly throughout the day, my DisplayLink monitor will freeze for a few seconds before going through a power cycle (or perhaps reboot). By "freeze", I mean the monitor still displays all the active windows as well as a mouse cursor artifact stuck in its last position on that screen for a few seconds. The mouse cursor is moved to the primary monitor and cannot be moved back to the DisplayLink screen again until after it power cycles. The power cycle forces all open windows from that screen over to my primary monitor screen, which is pretty disruptive. I'd say this happens every couple hours or so.

I haven't been able to pin it down to any behavior in particular yet, but generally seems to be when I'm using Chrome on my DisplayLink monitor. I just tried disabling Chrome's hardware acceleration again (even though this doesn't exhibit the same symptoms as the old HW acceleration problem) and we'll see if that helps.

Disabling the HW acceleration setting in Chrome does not appear to help. I'll try downgrading to the 2.4 driver next.

Downgrading to the 2.4 driver still results in the same issue (although it seems more stable, I haven't had the power cycle for almost a full day).

The plot thickens.

After the last DisplayLink power cycle using the 2.4 driver mentioned above, I uninstalled the 2.4 driver, restarted, installed the 2.5 driver, restarted again, and began using the monitor as normal.

It's just crashed again, but this time it hasn't come back up. My DisplayLink connected monitor just appears to be powered off. The red power indicator on the Diamond USB adapter didn't come back on until I manually unplugged the USB cable and plugged it back in, at which point my DisplayLink monitor turned back on.

Crash report attached yet again.

Hi BryGuy,

There seem to be no device connected in the latest logs. The previous logs show the device becoming suddenly unreachable. This and the issue description seem to point to a hardware issue.
The usual things to check in this case are:
- Power: check that the DisplayLink device has enough power to operate - connecting to an externally powered USB hub with nothing else connected is a good check (a USB2 hub would do)
- Cables: a new, short cable would rule this problem out
- If these checks fail, I'm afraid the device is probably not working correctly and you'd have to contact the manufacturer if still in warranty

Hope this is helpful.

Best regards,
Carlo

Carlo,

Thanks for the response. I've started leaning towards it being a hardware issue myself.

I'll try removing the USB cable extension as well as plugging in to a powered USB hub instead of directly into one of the USB ports on the MacBook and see how that goes. If it's still failing, I'll try to get my hands on another one and report back.

Thanks again.

Well,

It's been over a month since swapping out my displaylink adapter for a spare we had floating around the office and I haven't experienced any more of the crashes. As such, I'll say that it appears to definitely have been the hardware.