fwupd/plugins/thunderbolt

Thunderbolt™ Support

Introduction

Thunderbolt™ is the brand name of a hardware interface developed by Intel that allows the connection of external peripherals to a computer. Versions 1 and 2 use the same connector as Mini DisplayPort (MDP), whereas version 3 uses USB Type-C.

Comments

The design of this plugin is somewhat different to other plugins. In the authors opinion, the suboptimal design features are as follows:

• There are no signals from libtbtfwu when devices are added or removed.
• Individual tbt_fwu_Controller's cannot be refcounted and previously returned objects are invalid as soon as tbt_fwu_getControllerList() is called. This means we have to have a 'lookaside' array of info structs which we have to invalidate manually.
• The ID, VendorID, ModelID and NVMVersion are implemented by calling methods rather than reading properties off an object. This means reading properties are not cached and can fail, which is also why the lookaside array is used.
• There is a hardcoded 3s delay on hotplug and unplug as the daemon state can get out of sync with the UDev list of devices.
• The tbt_fwu_Controller_validateFWImage() does image validation client side which is apparently delibertate.
• The daemon does not keep track of the physical devices, so we have to check a list of cached added sysfs paths to be able to do a rescan only when a Thunderbolt controller is removed.

Build Requirements

For Thunderbolt online update support, you need to install libtbtfwu.

• source: https://github.com/01org/thunderbolt-software-user-space/tree/fwupdate

If you don't want or need this functionality you can use the --disable-thunderbolt option.