looking for a simple PCIe video card

[Ian.M]

*Nice*.  Looking at the osmo-fl2k source, it appears there is Win32 and Mac support so it isn't Linux only.   With a bit of work it could probably be turned into a general purpose three channel AWG with 100MHz or better sample rate, and if an external I2C controlled amplifier/attenuator buffer board was designed, that could be integrated,  controlled by the FL2000DX's DDC interface.

Also, I suspect HSYNC could be repurposed as a trigger pulse output. Unfortunately a trigger input or external clock is unlikely to be possible due to hardware limitations.

[DiTBho]

Its worth noting there is actually an official OEM Linux driver for it

it has support for kernel v3.* and v4.*

do you know if there is already around support for kernel v5? I am on an embedded SBC, running kernel 5.4.128...5.12.* ? Otherwise I will try to find the time to port it.

5.12 and 5.14 are experimental and not exactly stable. I am already having a lot of problems; bugs accessing to unaligned memory, and Gcc v11 "alloca" that leaves garbage in the upper 32 bits 

[DiTBho]

OK, just checked, it compiles on K5 

[Berni]

The fl2k adapters are unusual in that they can output arbitrary waveforms without regular sync pulses, well worth getting some for that purpose alone.
https://osmocom.org/projects/osmo-fl2k/wiki

Have you considered a Raspberry Pi or similar acting as a VNC client with the target running a VNC server?

Yes these are the kind of minimal hardware USB to HDMI/VGA adapters i talked about. This is the reason why they need a good deal of CPU time to run and require a reliable high bandwith on USB otherwise the video output gets an interruption and you can see the artifact.

This is only the cheap ones. All the proper USB video adapters are much more sophisticated and have a framebuffer inside of it. So those don't need to be constantly spoon fed video data, so this means less CPU load and lack of proper USB bandwith just means the frame rate slows down.

One could indeed make an impressive AWG using this. The proper Keysight AWGs that can be fed data live from PCIe are hugely expensive and require a PXI rack to run. Also a possibility for a SDR radio transmitter here if you add a RF modulator chip onto this.

[Psi]

Yeah, a dual core CPU is kind of a requirement.
Thought it obviously depends what your resolution is.
640x480 text console is quite different to 1080p30

[Ian.M]

A minimum of two cores isn't an arduous requirement nowadays.  Even my decade old PC which has a Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU     E7500  @ 2.93GHz, has no problems running a Fresco Logic FL2000DX adapter, playing video at the  highest resolution my second screen can support (1280x960), and I haven't noticed excessively high CPU loads while the second screen is active.

However I will be bearing in mind the FL2000DX's CPU load and bus bandwidth demands when handling large amounts of data on external USB 3 SSDs, where dropping back to a single display  may be worth it.