Linux 4.7 To Finally Support The First "Light Ridge" Thunderbolt Controller

Written by Michael Larabel in Intel on 19 May 2016 at 01:20 PM EDT. 6 Comments
INTEL
While "Light Ridge" was the first copper Thunderbolt controller and released back in 2010, only now in 2016 is the first-generation controller seeing mainline Linux support.

Linux support for newer Thunderbolt devices have improved over time, but only for Linux 4.7 is there support for the Light Ridge first-generation controller being added to the mainline kernel. This Light Ridge copper controller (rather than being fiber-optic based) was found in the 2011 and some 2012 iMacs, Mac Minis, and MacBook Pro devices from Apple.


The PCI 4.7 updates are adding in this first-generation Light Ridge Thunderbolt controller support.

The patches for this support explain that there was a variety of issues with this early Thunderbolt controller but in the end it's just a few dozen lines of code changes for bringing it up on the modern Linux kernel.
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