// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Why open source rocks – a new SM750 (Silicon Motion GPU) HDMI Driver
Push this card to real 2048-wide output or a software-scaled 2560x1080
ultrawide desktop, with bandwidth-saving colour conversion and update
optimisations for smoother performance.
Linux display driver for the single-HDMI SE-DP750A-HDMI PCIe card.
Experimental: this driver is for one specific SM750 board. Optional modes
can exceed published GPU or monitor clock limits and may produce no signal,
distortion, or an unstable display. Keep SSH or another recovery route
available when trying non-EDID modes.
The tested board is sold or marked as SE-DP750A-HDMI and has all of these:
The PCI ID alone is not enough. Other SM750 cards may use VGA, a different
transmitter, or different GPIO wiring and are not currently supported.
Ubuntu 24.04 and Linux Mint 22 users can build a DKMS package locally:
The reboot matters: it lets the package blacklist Linux's old sm750fb driver
before it can claim the card. The package is named sm750hdmifb; the kernel
module is sm750hdmidrm.ko so it cannot be confused with sm750fb.ko.
The driver is intended for Linux 6.17 and newer. DKMS deliberately refuses
older kernels because the required DRM interfaces are not supported by this
project. The source has compatibility paths for Linux 6.17 through the 6.x
series and for Linux 7.0 onward. It currently builds and passes the full test
suite against 6.17 and 7.0 Ubuntu kernels; the manual CI workflow also builds
against Ubuntu 24.04's 6.17 kernel headers.
There is no fixed upper version cap, but future kernels can change internal DRM
APIs. Because this is an out-of-tree driver, a new kernel version may require a
source update even though it falls within the intended 6.17+ range.
Prebuilt packages, when available, are published under
GitHub Releases.
Building locally is recommended because DKMS compiles against the installed
kernel headers.