why I suck at finishing stuff , or how I learned to stop working and love DisplayPort MST

DisplayPort 1.2 Multi-stream Transport is a feature that allows daisy chaining of DP devices that support MST into all kinds of wonderful networks of devices. Its been on the TODO list for many developers for a while, but the hw never quite materialised near a developer.

At the start of the week my local Red Hat IT guy asked me if I knew anything about DP MST, it turns out the Lenovo T440s and T540s docks have started to use DP MST, so they have one DP port to the dock, and then dock has a DP->VGA, DP->DVI/DP, DP->HDMI/DP ports on it all using MST. So when they bought some of these laptops and plugged in two monitors to the dock, it fellback to using SST mode and only showed one image. This is not optimal, I'd call it a bug :)

Now I have a damaged in transit T440s (the display panel is in pieces) with a dock, and have spent a couple of days with DP 1.2 spec in one hand (monitor), and a lot of my hair in the other. DP MST has a network topology discovery process that is build on sideband msgs send over the auxch which is used in normal DP to read/write a bunch of registers on the plugged in device. You then can send auxch msgs over the sideband msgs over auxch to read/write registers on other devices in the hierarchy!

Today I achieved my first goal of correctly encoding the topology discovery message and getting a response from the dock:
[ 2909.990743] link address reply: 4
[ 2909.990745] port 0: input 1, pdt: 1, pn: 0
[ 2909.990746] port 1: input 0, pdt: 4, pn: 1
[ 2909.990747] port 2: input 0, pdt: 0, pn: 2
[ 2909.990748] port 3: input 0, pdt: 4, pn: 3

There are a lot more steps to take before I can produce anything, along with dealing with the fact that KMS doesn't handle dynamic connectors so well, should make for a fun tangent away from the job I should be doing which is finishing virgil.

I've ordered another DP MST hub that I can plug into AMD and nvidia gpus that should prove useful later, also for doing deeper topologies, and producing loops.

Also some 4k monitors using DP MST as they are really two panels, but I don't have one of them, so unless one appears I'm mostly going to concentrate on the Lenovo docks for now.