USB4 / Thunderbolt Improvements Head Into Linux 5.11

[phoronix]

Phoronix: USB4 / Thunderbolt Improvements Head Into Linux 5.11

As part of the areas of the kernel overseen by Greg Kroah-Hartman is the USB subsystem. The USB (and Thunderbolt) updates are now in mainline as part of the ongoing Linux 5.11 merge window...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-5.11-USB-Updates

[kylew77]

Not a troll I swear, use and love the *BSDs but they were very slow with uptake of USB 3 compared to Linux. Genuinely wonder how long it will take for them to pick up USB 4. Then again wired 2.5 Gbps Ethernet is already seeing support.

[schmidtbag]

Not a troll I swear, use and love the *BSDs but they were very slow with uptake of USB 3 compared to Linux. Genuinely wonder how long it will take for them to pick up USB 4. Then again wired 2.5 Gbps Ethernet is already seeing support.

I don't think it will take quite as long, since I don't think the architecture going from 3.2 to 4.0 is too drastically different compared to 2.0 to 3.0.

[pgeorgi]

I don't think it will take quite as long, since I don't think the architecture going from 3.2 to 4.0 is too drastically different compared to 2.0 to 3.0.

3.0 was a faster 2.0 where the biggest complication was that some policy has been moved into the controller to support virtualization. So the USB stack had to adapt to not assigning a USB device address because the controller did, some other minor changes (e.g. twice the number of devices per bus possible, a streams mechanism that layers on top of the device/interface scheme) and add a driver for the new XHCI host controller.

4.0 is essentially Thunderbolt with a scheme to integrate a USB 3.0 for compatibility, where Thunderbolt is a weird concoction to present an external PCIe bus, so something else entirely from earlier USB.

[FireBurn]

Does Sage Sharp still work on USB?

[torsionbar28]

Not a troll I swear, use and love the *BSDs but they were very slow with uptake of USB 3 compared to Linux. Genuinely wonder how long it will take for them to pick up USB 4. Then again wired 2.5 Gbps Ethernet is already seeing support.

I think the reason for this, is that FreeBSD is often used in enterprise network appliances and commercial equipment. It therefore requires robust support for wired networking standards in that role. USB3 on the other hand, is a consumer client peecee technology that isn't used in the business world or the datacenter. Makes perfect sense, the large corporations who do the majority of hardware enablement code in Linux and FreeBSD will put their efforts only towards the hardware and features that benefit them. For the more consumer facing stuff, it's up to the community to code it, which always takes a bit longer.

Old timers like me will remember Linux in 1990's, where it took literally *years* for every newly released piece of hardware to become supported, as it was all primarily done by hobbyists in their spare time. If you wanted a good experience with a recent graphics card, you had to buy a closed source commercial X11 server like Metro-X or Accelerated-X. Now we have full 3D accelerated support on launch day or very soon after, from all the top GPU vendors. Amazing how far we've come.