Hi all, currently eyeing the following USB4 dock (40Gbps, 100W), seems to check all the boxes for me, but I’m unsure how it works on Linux for the AI 300 series.
Plugable USB C Docking Station Dual Monitor, 11-in-1, USB4 40G 100W
I want to use this dock under Fedora Workstation. Does anybody have any experience with this dock under Linux?
Or does anybody have any similar USB4 docks (40Gbps, 100W) that could be recommended for Linux?
Thanks
Looks like that one should work fine. The key you want to look for is “driver-less” to make sure it doesn’t need that awful displaylink crap. This dock seems to be one such dock. Other things to look for are MST with DSC but they often don’t list that specifically.
I recently got this dock because I need 3 monitors and more USB ports than the one you are getting. Works great!
We do not currently recommend our UD-4VPD USB4 docking station, or Thunderbolt 4 docking stations with DisplayPort MST for use with AMD computers with Linux at this time. For Windows it should be just fine, but the Linux AMD MST drivers are just not stable enough for us to recommend this configuration.
Alternative docking station options for Thunderbolt 4 is Intel’s USB4 implementation that should work just fine with USB4 hosts:
Thanks for the heads up. Guess I’ll have to look elsewhere.
What kernel did you check with? I believe with 6.15 things should be improved now that deferred aux traffic is handled. This helped a variety of docks and monitors.
I’m running the 6.15 kernel and was looking at the UD-4VPD. Do you have any updates on it’s compatibility? Where does it cause trouble?
I’ll be running a single HDMI external display initially, along with ethernet and usb devices.
Edit:
I found this bug report thread and a patch note both from Mika Westerberg, and both now upstream, where the UD-4VPD is tackled.
Does that cover the driver issues mentioned or not fully?
Thank you for replying back, please note, we currently do not recommend this docking station for use with AMD based Linux computers. The AMD drivers for Linux have poor DisplayPort MST support, this docking station relies on DisplayPort MST to enable the external displays. In my testing with Ryzen 5000, and 7000 series processor and processor graphics the systems ( Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and Fedora 40 at the time ) were not able to reliably detect the two external displays on system boot up or on hot plug, when the displays were detected they tended to be unstable, and sometimes would cause the system to hang for prolonged periods of time. During these hangs the system was unresponsive, sometimes the system would recover disabling the docking station and connected devices, sometimes the system would remain in an unresponsive state until the docking station was unplugged.
AMD’s graphics drivers are embedded in the Linux Kernel, I have not done any testing with AMD’s proprietary drivers, however from forum posts of other users with MST adapters, hubs, and display daisy-chaining it sounds like similar issues also affect the AMD proprietary drivers.
Unfortunately properly enabling this docking station and other MST display adapters for use with AMD and Linux will require significant work on the AMD MST drivers, until that point this docking station will not be stable with AMD host computers.
AMD doesn’t have proprietary drivers. It’s an open source kernel driver (amdgpu) and open source user mode driver (radeonsi).
I strongly suggest you revisit testing on something containing kernel 6.15. The fixes for deferred aux handling should fix perceived issues with MST. If there is still an issue we need details to dig into it.