Linux 5.5 Bringing Thunderbolt Lane Bonding, DP Tunneling Updates

Intel's Mika Westerberg who continues overseeing the Linux kernel's Thunderbolt code has prepped more changes ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.5 cycle.

The latest Thunderbolt changes queued into Mika's "next" branch include:

- Support for Thunderbolt lane bonding to allow aggregating two 10/20 Gb/s lanes into a single 20/40 Gb/s bonded link.

- Updating of some Thunderbolt register names to match the text of the USB 4.0 specification.

- Titan Ridge controller updates for handling DisplayPort tunneling.

- DisplayPort adapter pairing and resource management as another bit of DP tunneling work for Thunderbolt 3 devices. There is also now bandwidth management support for DisplayPort tunnels.

On a related note, last month Intel did send out the initial USB 4.0 support for the Linux kernel though as of writing that has yet to be queued in the USB-next branch. So at this stage the USB 4.0 support might not be ready for the Linux 5.5 merge window opening in a few weeks.