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Future Displays and Input Devices - Jaya Kumar

Biography

Jaya Kumar enjoys hacking on embedded systems and other fun things. He also likes writing about technology and has contributed an article to LWN and also recently to Linux Journal on E-Paper technologies. He is the author of the fbdev deferred IO framework, the E-Ink display controller drivers, various other drivers in the Linux kernel, and a DMC9000 input driver in Xorg. He has a deep interest in E-Paper technology and also the use of free and open source technologies in India and other developing countries.

Abstract

E-Paper displays and their controllers present some interesting new problems to the Linux kernel, framebuffer subsystem and userspace elements.

Recent e-paper controllers such as those from E-Ink are interfaced to the host in unusual ways. For example, as a secondary device feeding on the output of a system's native display controller while also receiving some control over GPIO. Some have integrated input capability and as a result a display controller is also multiplexed as a input device. Many e-paper technologies such as electrophoretic, and cholesteric displays have high latencies (on the order of 200ms - 4s) for display updates while having large resolutions (1200x842). This latency and the non-memory mappable IO interfaces typically used by the controllers increases the complexity associated with treating them as traditional framebuffers and using regular memory management.

This presentation will provide an overview of these displays and their controllers and then discuss the approaches that are currently in-progress to support them on Linux. This presentation may be of interest to memory management, fbdev and userspace windowing/input developers. The submitter is the author of E-Ink display controller drivers, a deferred IO framework and a few other drivers in the Linux kernel.