Thunderbolt On Linux Not Yet Primed For Success

Written by Michael Larabel in Intel on 5 May 2012 at 01:04 PM EDT. 4 Comments
INTEL
As a word of caution for anyone that was hoping Thunderbolt (a.k.a. Light Peak) was in good shape for Linux, the Intel technology doesn't appear to be quite ready yet.

Over the past few days there's been a kernel mailing list thread about Linux support for Thunderbolt when using an Apple MacBook Air computer and a beautiful 27-inch Apple Thunderbolt display. It turns out that monitor hot-plugging isn't working for the Thunderbolt driven display that effectively pairs DisplayPort and PCI Express into a serial data interface. The display isn't lighting up when being hot-plugged.

There was a talk at last year's Linux Plumbers Conference about Thunderbolt support for Linux, but it doesn't seem that all of the pieces are in place yet. The latest communication from the Linux kernel mailing list is that Greg Kroah-Hartman is going to try to get some Apple Thunderbolt hardware to look into the situation.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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