Linux's Thunderbolt Manager Bolt 0.8 Adds IOMMU Protection

Written by Michael Larabel in Hardware on 9 July 2019 at 10:44 AM EDT. 11 Comments
HARDWARE
Bolt, the Red Hat led project for managing Thunderbolt devices on Linux and their security, is out with their version 0.8 update to introduce better security for the growing number of Thunderbolt devices.

The headline feature of Bolt 0.8 is introducing IOMMU protection. The Bolt IOMMU support is for using the IOMMU unit on newer hardware and supported by newer kernels to only permit DMA access by Thunderbolt devices to assigned/safe memory regions rather than being able to access any of the system memory. This should further help tighten the Linux security around Thunderbolt and complement the other security measures that have been in place following issues like Thunderclap.

Bolt 0.8 also has a new config sub-command to read/list/write device properties, and other changes.

Moving forward, Bolt 0.9 will be working on new APIs, a terse output mode, a connecting device status, and other features. That will be followed by a buttoned up Bolt 1.0 release.

More details on Bolt 0.8 via this blog post by Red Hat's Christian Kellner.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

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.

Popular News This Week