Displaylink ceases to work in 10.13.4

[Poly]

Originally Posted by AlbanRampon

Dear DisplayLink Mac Users,
Finding a solution to this issue remains the highest business priority within DisplayLink.
Our teams are investigating several potential workarounds that could enable some level of extended desktop functionality to be restored in 10.13.4. In parallel, we are continuing to explore with Apple routes to a permanent and complete solution.

Big thanks to the DisplayLink team for not giving up. I hope DisplayLink docks will be back to normal soon. Although you compress video data for USB and decompress on chip, have you explored this "hack" yet?

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads...-work.1974167/

What if you trick the macOS into "display port alt-mode" and transmit video data via the extra lanes? The DisplayLink SoC may needs a reprogramming for accepting data via Display Port than USB directly. The hack in the link above perhaps also requires macOS to allow support for MST – if you want to run two extended monitors, which it never did on Intel GPUs.

The downside is that USB 3 ports will drop to USB 2.0 due to lack of bandwidth.

I'm trying to give you ideas, although I might be wrong.

Originally Posted by tommiy

Ok that sounds like a commitment that the original capabilities will not be returned even when if a new driver is delivered. Guess it really is time to find the alternative.

There are no alternatives. DisplayLink's business model (unique selling point) is solely based on their proprietary compression technology, allowing them to squeeze a broad bandwidth video signal through a tight USB cable.

It seems Apple has fundamentally changed how frame buffers are passed on to external displays. As far as I understand the DisplayLink driver was sort of a Man-in-the-Middle hack – hijacking the frame buffers and compressing them for the USB's bandwidth bottleneck. Apparently, that trick doesn't work anymore. Now, if that's the case it does take more effort than just a few new lines of code.

We just have to be patient, stick with 10.13.3 for now, and hope everything will be fine again soon.