Frequent freeze of DisplayLink monitors
 

I've still got frequent moments where both DisplayLink monitors freeze completely. Unplugging them and waiting for all opened windows to reappear on the builtin display of my MBA and plugging the monitors back in get's me going again.

I'm kinda amazed that I've reported this several times in other threads and that I haven't seen any confirmation about this behavior, so I thought I'd start a new thread.

I've got 2 Philips Brilliance 231P's daisy chained via USB 3.0 to my 2012 MBA. I've experienced this phenomenon for the last few beta drivers up until the production release of the current 2.4 driver. I've updated OS X in the meantime as well, from Mavericks to Yosemite, there were no changes in behavior.

I've attached the output of the DisplayLink Information tool, a few minutes after this freeze up occurred. I see lines like these in the console:

Does anyone else experience these freeze up's too?

Is it a bad thing to daisy chain both monitors?

Well, it's not related to daisy chaining two DisplayLink monitors, I've connected both directly to my 2 USB 3.0 ports and I've just had a freeze again. I've ran the DisplayLink Information tool again, which you find attached.

Well DisplayLink, some kind of acknowledgement would be nice?

Hi D43m0n,

The logs show an unusual situation: just one of the two monitors appears to be disconnected at some point and once it's reconnected after around 10 seconds we can't re-enable correctly the screen updates.
We will look more in detail in the logs to see how can we make the reconnection more robust but to help you out right now I'd like to understand if this disconnection is a proper unplug and replug or the device is falling off the bus for some reason.
If the disconnection was not done on purpose, typically this could happen for lack of power or because of an imperfect connector. I'd suggest to check for a while with just one monitor and if all is fine with the other.
In the meanwhile we'll continue investigating this issue.

Best regards,
Carlo

I wanted to toss in that I am also experiencing frequent freezing of my monitor using DisplayLink 2.4. I have a monitor connected to my 2011 MBP running Yosemite via a minideck 3.0, and after about 5 minutes of use or so it is freezing. Similarly to the OP, if I unplug until the windows reset, and plug it back in, it goes back to normal. This is making that monitor pretty much unusable. :(

I just wanted to chime in here and mention that I had this situation with a facetime window open on one of the monitors - after a minutes or two, my system appeared to freeze. Unplugging the displaylink device let the system sort itself out and 'catch up' after about 30 seconds of waiting..

Hi shad0wca7,

This is most likely a different issue than the one reported at the start of the thread. We can reproduce it on 10.10 but not on 10.11GM so probably fixed in the OS. The application still freezes occasionally but the screens are fine.
We'll test on the final 10.11.

Cheers,
Carlo

Ah OK, thanks Carlo and sorry for the inadvertent thread hijack!

Thank you for your response Carlo. The disconnection is not on purpose. It might be an imperfect connector. I'll try with one screen at a time to see if that has an imperfect connector. In the meantime, can you determine from the logs if it's always the same monitor that's failing (by some UID)? I can get my hands on other cables and even monitors. I know a few folks with MacBook's and the same monitors, I'll check on them to see whether they've experienced something similar with just one screen.

I've attached two new USB3 cables to both DisplayLink monitors. And very unexpected, within 3 minutes all screens froze again, except the mouse cursor. I've collected new debug information, which is attached to this message.

Carlo, would you (or a colleague) please take a look?

I've been having the same issue for quite some time as well. I've tried different USB cables and ports as well with no success. The issue is pretty predicable though, occurring whenever the screen is frequently changing and being very CPU intensive (videos, or in my case tailing logs on a terminal freezes it up almost every time). I've attached the log info as well.

One thing that hasn't been mentioned yet...
Unplugging the display and plugging it back in fixes it only sometimes. The rest of the times no matter what I do, I can't get rid of the display. Even when I undock my laptop after a freeze, there's a "phantom display" that the OS will not get rid of without restarting even when I kill the displaylink manager and agent.

Any advice?