I just came back from FOSDEM '15 and heard that there are some activity with DL USB 3.0. Dave Airlie (Red Hat) is attempting to figure out a new protocol.

http://airlied.livejournal.com/
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~airlied/dl3dev/

Did not buy USB 3.0 Docking Station from Dell due to lacking Linux support
 

Bought Dell XPS 13 2015 model, installed Ubuntu 14.04 with minor mods. Fantastic computer, recommend. Gladly to myself found this thread with all discussions relating to absence of Linux driver before I bought the computer.

I did not buy Dell USB 3.0 docking station as an accessorry. I voted and acted with my money. "Shame on you" approach seem not to work with DisplayLink.

No Linux, no buy
 

Another verbose +1:

I run Linux as my embedded and web development environment. Was about to buy one of those cute usb 3.0 docking stations, because it's exactly what I need. Then I found out about this fiasco, the fact that DisplayLink chips do not support Linux intentionally (for whatever reasons, I don't care). Big thumbs down. Not going to buy a docking station until Linux is supported.

I hope DisplayLink or a competitor supports Linux soon.

To DisplayLink reps:
It's time to accept it, Linux is real and there are users who expect product support. Don't tell us why it can't work. We couldn't care less. Make it work so we can focus on the next big thing.
Thank you.

this guy seems to be working / prodding the issue
 

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~airlied/dl3dev/
http://airlied.livejournal.com/
https://plus.google.com/104877287288...ts/PQ6adATfcyT
https://www.youtube.com/watch?featur...tGNs9Dc#t=2595
"I've wasted a few months on that lately, just because I don't like them" :/

"So for some reason I decided to look at the displaylink usb3 adaptors today. (no good news).
This blog post is so I don't forget all of this when I page it out. Notes, HDCP1.0 being broken doesn't matter to this, maybe HDCPv2.0 being a bit broken could be used, but I'm not sure how!"

Hey - we demoed Android and ChromeOS support at international forums. We run linux hugely internally, like all our chip development runs on linux. But since it's timewarped locked CentOS for them to use the tools they need, there's very little chance we could get our drivers to work on them.

If we saw credible support for the existing DL1x5 chips in Linux for multiscreen, then that would be some motivation. Until that, people will just moan that we haven't bent the OS to work with our chips as well as Windows did with little change to the number of complaints we get.

The DL1x5 chips are well supported on newer Linux kernels.

I have a "Lenovo VDK8736 USB Port replicator with digital video" using the DL165 chipset and when I connect it to my Ubuntu 14.04 it just works... no configuration required.

The performance is not very good when you use a display manager like Unity or Gnome but it works.

If DisplayLink provided support for the newer chipset with USB-3 then I guess the performance problem will go away.

what are you saying exactly?
 

I'm having a hard time comprehending what your trying to communicate here. Are you saying that "yes, we realize that Linux is a valuable target, but don't release specs nor proprietary drivers because Linux users whine and moan", or are you saying "our devs run ancient centos versions, and since that's the case anything we build will be deprecated"?
Please clarify your stance on this issue, as there clearly is a huge following that have your products but are prohibited from using them.
Again; reaching out to the community with some documentation would very well get you a long way, as it did with the libdlo drivers quite a few years back now. the pluggable guys even shipped embedded linux hardware using it, I can't see how this would be any different now..

DisplayLink Alternative
 

Like others here I was bummed to found out DisplayLink USB 3.0 devices are not support on Linux. But there is now an alternative: Displayport MST (multi-stream transport).

There is support for MST starting in kernel 3.17 (thank you David Airlie). Here's how to use MST in Ubuntu with Intel graphics card: http://askubuntu.com/a/552094

Still waiting...
 

Hi!

Could you please allow GNU/Linux users to use DisplayLink? Or could you publish the complete specs so that the community can build the required drivers on them?

Thanks!

Got a reply, this is my attempt for translating it (oh, the irony of them linking a fbdev support page):

"I checked status with my supervisor but unfortunately Displaylinks says that Linux on have "experimental support" (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/DisplayLink) and thus aren't supported under linux by Dell. This means that there isn't anything I can do about the issue, but you can contact sales at 67 11 68 00 if you'd like to return the unit."

Sjekket status med min supervisor men dessvärre så seier DisplayLink at Linux har kun "expermintal support" (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/DisplayLink) og er ikke stöttet under Linux av Dell. Dette mener at det finns ikke noen som jeg kan gjöre åt saken men du kan kontakte Salg på 67 11 68 00 om du vil hevde kjöpet.

Mvh,
Name
Support Technician
DELL | ProSupport Norway