Hi
I need to make a solution which permits having secondary monitors on USB (small ones - vga/qvga)
As far as I seen the display driver model has changed completly from the XP.
Does anybody know a good startpoint for a vista display driver?
The R200Sample from the WDK is good for something?
A second problem is that Vista does not permits having two display drivers from different vendors. Does anybody knows solutions for this?
This change seems to be a stupid one for me - a lot of gadgets, projectors, docking stations are killed with a decision like this - have no idea what was in MS’s mind …
regards,
-Barni
Csenteri Barna wrote:
A second problem is that Vista does not permits having two display drivers
from different vendors. Does anybody knows solutions for this?
This appears to be only true for WDDM drivers, XPDM drivers can still be heterogenous.
>This appears to be only true for WDDM drivers, XPDM drivers can still be heterogenous.
Yeah, but this does not help at all since Vista doesn’t runs a WDDM and a XPDM driver in the same time so if I make an XPDM driver I have to use an XPDM one for my primary monitor too (no Aero and other Vista things which might piss up customers). Not talking about the fact that I cannot expect that every chip supplier will write bot XPDM, and WDDM drivers all the time … As you can see XPDM is not an option …
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/display/multimonVista.mspx#EOB - check this for details
-Barni
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Barna Csenteri wrote:
>This appears to be only true for WDDM drivers, XPDM drivers can still
be heterogenous.
Yeah, but this does not help at all since Vista doesn’t runs a WDDM
and a XPDM driver in the same time so if I make an XPDM driver I have
to use an XPDM one for my primary monitor too (no Aero and other Vista
things which might piss up customers). Not talking about the fact that
I cannot expect that every chip supplier will write bot XPDM, and WDDM
drivers all the time … As you can see XPDM is not an option …
Of course it is. You aren’t going to want to support DirectX 10 on your
USB graphics device, are you? If not, then you don’t want to write a
WDDM driver. Further, as you have already read, what you ask simply
cannot be done with WDDM. You cannot make a standalone secondary
display device with WDDM. It is not possible, end of story, stop asking.
XPDM and WDDM will have to co-exist for a very long time. There are
some fundamental and very useful tasks that simply cannot be
accomplished while a WDDM driver is loaded, hetergeneous display being
only one example. Until Microsoft reengineers the WDDM device stack to
support these tasks, and there have been no hints about such a thing
happening, XPDM will still be a viable and necessary option.
–
Tim Roberts, xxxxx@probo.com
Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.
“You cannot make a standalone secondary display device with WDDM. It is not possible, end of story, stop asking”
Are You sure? Displaylink has a product which does this and suports Aero … And their USB2VGA stuff works with ati, nvidia and other cards installed.
“XPDM will still be a viable and necessary option”
XPDM does fulfill my needs. My only concern is this: “All graphics adapters in a system must use the same display driver model. That is, all of them should either be running XPDM or WDDM”
This is from the WDDM MS page.
If I understood correct I’m in trouble since I cannot ask my customers to forget Aero on their primary monitor if they want to use my small LCD as a secondary one …
-Barni
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Barna Csenteri wrote:
“You cannot make a standalone secondary display device with WDDM. It
is not possible, end of story, stop asking”
Are You sure? Displaylink has a product which does this and suports
Aero … And their USB2VGA stuff works with ati, nvidia and other
cards installed.
So they say, with restrictions. Apparently, they do so by hooking into
the WDDM driver directly. If you want to go down that path, good luck,
but you’ll have to go talk to ATI, nVidia, Intel and Via on an
individual basis. There is no documented interface for doing this.
If I understood correct I’m in trouble since I cannot ask my customers
to forget Aero on their primary monitor if they want to use my small
LCD as a secondary one …
Well, that’s certainly Microsoft’s model. Remote Desktop, VNC, and
mirror drivers all cause Aero to shut off.
Aero is a very demanding environment that integrates tightly and
delicately with the display driver. It works only under the most ideal
conditions, and right now any kind of mirroring or secondary display
device upsets those ideal conditions. Over time, I expect Microsoft to
loosen these conditions, but right now that’s the situation.
–
Tim Roberts, xxxxx@probo.com
Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.
Have you looked at Displaylink’s product to see what drivers they
install and where they sit in the stack?
That would seem to be a good step towards understanding how to do this.
I very much doubt it’s documented anywhere.
Barna Csenteri wrote:
“You cannot make a standalone secondary display device with WDDM. It is
not possible, end of story, stop asking”
Are You sure? Displaylink has a product which does this and suports Aero
… And their USB2VGA stuff works with ati, nvidia and other cards
installed.
“XPDM will still be a viable and necessary option”
XPDM does fulfill my needs. My only concern is this: “*All graphics
adapters in a system must use the same display driver model.* That is,
all of them should either be running XPDM or WDDM”
This is from the WDDM MS page.
If I understood correct I’m in trouble since I cannot ask my customers
to forget Aero on their primary monitor if they want to use my small LCD
as a secondary one …
-Barni
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email address)</http:>
“Apparently, they do so by hooking into
the WDDM driver directly”
That’s something what got through my mind when I saw their compatibility list.
I will have to check in details to see … For me this kind of backdoors are not an option …
“Aero is a very demanding environment that integrates tightly and
delicately with the display driver.”
When I have read their decision based on crash statistics I said - I don’t believe this.
I would say that their problem was a simple one: they could not do it in their timeframe and simply taken out this functionality until it’s done. Too bad for us but that’s it I guess.
I will do more investigations because I want to know more clear what can be done and how.
Meantime any new ideas are welcome and thank’s for everybody for their response …
-Barni
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hii. Csenteri Barna, I have read your query. We were also working on the same project for the past 4-5 month. But tiil date not able to accomplish it. Actually you are not going to get any help on this topic from anywhere. But the point is, it is possible as display link has done it recently.
regards
prashant
Yeah but as You can see Displaylink most probably use a backdoor since they have a compatibility list. If you can find anything let us know … I will do the same …
Tim You said that also remote control stuff like VNC will be disabled.
It isn’t. I have WDDM driver (checked in device manager), I have Aero enabled (shadows, glassy stuff) and still works.
Tried with and without desktop composition (Aero settings) - both works.
Even the shadows are visible on the viewer side so for me it seems to be a full desktop capture as VNC works usually.
I tried with TightVNC which is does not have Vista suport and it worked out on first start (firewall disabled)
Of course this does not say anything about drivers since screen capture also works on Vista and it’s on different level.
But still confusing with the desktop composition issue. I will have to dig in deeper into this …
-Barni
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On Jan 24, 2008 12:07 PM, Barna Csenteri wrote:
> Tim You said that also remote control stuff like VNC will be disabled.
VNC is a poor example, as it is essentially (IIRC) merely a
screendump. It is noticably slower than RDC and not very secure
(unless you use the commercial version which has stronger encryption
– where hopefully passwords aren’t limited to 8 characters). I used
VNC a lot prior to RDC, but now avoid it like the plague. (The best
combination is RDC + HP’s technology which lets you remote control
everything, including OS installation over the network)
From your discussion, what strikes me is that this might never be
properly solved. I would assume that open windows receive a window
message when the Aero switch occur. If one device is Aero-capable, and
another is not, how should a window behave when one half is displayed
on the Aero-capable device and the other half is not? (or am I missing
something trivial in all this? – I assume the desktop will span over
both display devices)
–
Rune
Just out of curiosity, why do all of these thing cause Windows to
disable Aero? Is it about performance, DRM, …? Also, how does one
know if Aero is running or not?
Thanks,
mm
Tim Roberts wrote:
Rune Moberg wrote:
> On Jan 24, 2008 12:07 PM, Barna Csenteri wrote:
>>
>>> Tim You said that also remote control stuff like VNC will be disabled.
>>>
>>
>> VNC is a poor example, as it is essentially (IIRC) merely a
>> screendump.
>
> It will do that if it has to, as a fallback, but it’s preferred
> mechanism is a mirror driver, similar to what RDP uses. Mirror drivers
> disable Aero.
>
Martin O’Brien wrote:
Just out of curiosity, why do all of these thing cause Windows to
disable Aero? Is it about performance, DRM, …? Also, how does one
know if Aero is running or not?
Several reasons. For one, mirror drivers are XPDM, and right now Vista
cannot allow the two to coexist. You get one or the other. For
another, the whole concept of Aero is that windows are not drawn into
the visible frame buffer. Windows are rendered into offscreen textures,
and the desktop manager is basically a big Direct3D application that
composites them onto the visible desktop as textured rectangles. Any
model that expects to read a desktop image as a bitmap is out of luck,
because the image you see on the screen with Aero simply does not exist
in memory anywhere. It’s built on the fly during each refresh. It’s
fairly righteous voodoo.
So, when there is some component that needs the desktop as a bitmap,
Aero shuts off, and the windows get rendered in the visible frame buffer.
–
Tim Roberts, xxxxx@probo.com
Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.
> Any
model that expects to read a desktop image as a bitmap is out of luck,
because the image you see on the screen with Aero simply does not exist
in memory anywhere. It’s built on the fly during each refresh. It’s
fairly righteous voodoo.
So, when there is some component that needs the desktop as a bitmap,
Aero shuts off, and the windows get rendered in the visible frame buffer.
Can the graphics/3D HW output the resulting desktop image into video memory
and/or system’s RAM? AFAIK, it is possible but it is not fast with the
current HW and it is used for number-crunching on 3D HW.
Dmitriy Budko
VMware
> model that expects to read a desktop image as a bitmap is out of luck,
because the image you see on the screen with Aero simply does not exist
in memory anywhere. It’s built on the fly during each refresh. It’s
So, the modern video card’s RAMDAC can support nearly unlimited number of
semi-transparent overlays?
–
Maxim Shatskih, Windows DDK MVP
StorageCraft Corporation
xxxxx@storagecraft.com
http://www.storagecraft.com
>It will do that if it has to, as a fallback, but it’s preferred
mechanism is a mirror driver, similar to what RDP uses. Mirror drivers
disable Aero.
I agree that it’s not an option for remote streaming.
But for me switching off Aero on the primary monitor just because my small LCD was plugged in is not really an option. I would be pissed as a user because of this 
and if I would most probably at least 50% of the users would so I will have to find a different way like VNC does.
But my concern is to have a secondary monitor which seems to be impossible with WDDM as primary driver. XPDM again ends in a situation to have aero switched off …
Phew - this will be hard
Maxim S. Shatskih wrote:
> model that expects to read a desktop image as a bitmap is out of luck,
> because the image you see on the screen with Aero simply does not exist
> in memory anywhere. It’s built on the fly during each refresh. It’s
>
So, the modern video card’s RAMDAC can support nearly unlimited number of
semi-transparent overlays?
Well, it’s not the RAMDAC doing it, and it’s not overlays. It’s 3D
textures. The Aero desktop manager is essentially a Direct3D game.
Applications draw their top-level windows into textures. The desktop
manager uses Direct3D to create a display list that defines each
application’s main window as a pair of triangles (to make a rectangle),
mapped with one of the offscreen textures. Blending and overlapping
multiple windows is then just a matter of tweaking the Z coordinates and
the alpha values of the triangles.
It’s a relatively simple concept, but it’s a relatively large change
from the way things were done in the past.
–
Tim Roberts, xxxxx@probo.com
Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.