New open-source Linux driver pushes a cheap SM750 GPU card to ultrawide 2560x1080
Why open source rocks – a new SM750 (Silicon Motion GPU) HDMI Driver
KodeMunkie's sm750hdmifb is an experimental Linux DRM/KMS driver for the SE-DP750A-HDMI PCIe card, which uses Silicon Motion's SM750G10 and a SiI9024 HDMI transmitter. It enables dithered RGB565 scanout, DMA uploads, and software-scaled ultrawide modes up to 2560x1080 by compressing the desktop to the card's 2048-pixel hardware limit and letting the monitor stretch it. The driver targets Linux 6.17+ and is GPL-2.0-only, with no proprietary blobs.
2048 pixels is the highest real width this card can produce in hardware.
- SillyUsername
I wrote* a modern Linux driver that supports ultrawide resolutions, higher refresh, and faster performance than the original driver(s) on this cheap HDMI only variant server GPU.
I created it because I wanted my Nvidia GPUs to be compute only, and needed a cheap and small display GPU to run X11. I bought this GPU on AliExpress, after learning it had Linux support. It does, but kernel 5.x series and the sm750 driver in modern Linux only supports the older VGA/DVI variants.
Rather than send it back or throw it away, I decided to vibe code a new driver with new features, to make it usable for day to day desktop use. I've a little bit of a background in low level graphics so also added a cool little magic ordered dither (a pretty good one I think!) I devised myself, called "bbdither", and a few hacks to get 2560x1080 at 75hz on a device only officially documented as capable of up to 1920x1200 at 60hz, and PCI-E 1x speed.
Screenshots here: https://github.com/KodeMunkie/sm750hdmifb#screenshots
If you try it out, be careful - read the project disclaimer :)
*Vibe coded, as mentioned in Hackernews comments here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49415282
- arjie
Hey, how did you iterate on it? Quite interested in your process here considering you say it’s vibe coded. The iteration loop is crucial for that.
- sabot90260
Proprietary drivers for obscure hardware were the bane of my existence. Glad to see this SM750 driver open-sourced.
- userbinator
A GPU with HDMI and 16MB of VRAM is a very strange combination.
- marcodiego
Hmmm... How about adding it to the Free Software Foundation's "respects your freedom" hardware list?