Intel Rolls Out thunderbolt-utils To Manage USB4/Thunderbolt Devices On Linux

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel Rolls Out thunderbolt-utils To Manage USB4/Thunderbolt Devices On Linux

In addition to Intel engineers being responsible for much of the Linux kernel driver work around USB4 and Thunderbolt, they have now published thunderbolt-utils as a collection of user-space utilities for managing USB4/Thunderbolt on Linux environments...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Linux-thunderbolt-utils

[Mangix]

lstbt sounds very nice!

[Quackdoc]

maybe one day ill actually be able to use this lol

[edwaleni]

This was needed. When I tested several TB docks with Linux on a USB4 port, none of the existing TBTools worked. I also posted on this in the Clear Linux blog earlier this year.

[Vorpal]

How is this different than the existing "bolt" program? I also remember KDE (and probably Gnome) have some built in GUIs for configuring thunderbolt devices already.

It isn't clear what is actually new here to me. Just a better listing tool?

[ziguana]

Just a better listing tool?

I haven't tried the other tool, but I hope this isn't better. Just tried to build it on NixOS and it tried to write to `/usr/bin` during build (not even install). After I fixed that, it crashed when it couldn't find some node in sysfs (opened #3). Looking at the code, it just uses `cat` underneath and pipes things into bash. Not sure why this is in C.

[edwaleni]

How is this different than the existing "bolt" program? I also remember KDE (and probably Gnome) have some built in GUIs for configuring thunderbolt devices already.

It isn't clear what is actually new here to me. Just a better listing tool?

As I noted above, the existing tool does not work when a TB device is plugged into a USB4 port and passed through.

Even though the Linux Thunderbolt driver loads and the device works, the tools can't "see" the device tree.

[rogerx]

I haven't tried the other tool, but I hope this isn't better. Just tried to build it on NixOS and it tried to write to `/usr/bin` during build (not even install). After I fixed that, it crashed when it couldn't find some node in sysfs (opened #3). Looking at the code, it just uses `cat` underneath and pipes things into bash. Not sure why this is in C.

Because then the program might require Bash instead of just sh? ;-)

[Vorpal]

As I noted above, the existing tool does not work when a TB device is plugged into a USB4 port and passed through.

Even though the Linux Thunderbolt driver loads and the device works, the tools can't "see" the device tree.

Sounds like the existing tool should be fixed instead then. Especially if the new tool is as badly written as ziguana claims (haven't looked at it myself, so I can't confirm that).

[rene]

Unfortunately not really amazing code. No real library, no build system except a low-quality Makefile that directly compiles the binary into /usr/bin, ... WTH?

snprintf(path, sizeof(path),
"cat 2>/dev/null %s%s/port%u/regs | awk -v OFS=',' '{\\$1=\\$1}1'",
tbt_debugfs_path, router, i);
root_cmd = switch_cmd_to_root(path);

No further questions, ... :-/