UnRAID: Thunderbolt Networking

Hi IW,
Can you confirm if you will ever produce drivers to allow thunderbolt connectivity within UnRAID?

It’s a generic thunderbolt connection. Linux has native drivers. You need to bug unraid to move to Linux Kernel 6.8 and ensure they have the thunderbolt modules loaded.

short version, its not Zima’s job to fix unraids lack of thunderbolt support.

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Hello they have moved to the latest kernel update under Unraid 7 beta, and yet I can seem to find ant thunderbolt network interfaces.

IW please respond

do you find being demanding like that works for you? You do realize this is a community board and not a support channel right?

You should ask Unraid why thunderbolt-net driver is not working in their version of Linux (for example maybe they didn’t include thunderbolt in their kernel)

also note:

  • no adapters will show with ip a if the cables are not connected
  • if both machines are linux one machine needs to issue modprobe thunderbolt-net or modify the modprob file to do this at boot
  • if the other machine is windows / mac you need to ensure thunderbolt is working correctly (for example on windows this can sometimes take a reboot of the PC while the PC is connected to the ZC - this is a windows issue
  • make sure you are using a short TB4 certified cable, OWC are good, i have never got Cable Matters ceritfied cables working with TB-net - they seem to have issues

tl;dr you most likely have a non-IW issue, put ZimaOS back on you ZC and validate the TB functionality. If it doesn’t work with ZimaOS and you have checked the things above then maybe you have a hardware issue. This is unlikely.

Shove your attitude where the sun don’t shine. I’m hardly being demanding by asking IW to respond. They are quick to message me about my cooler mods!

you need to learn to read and be a little more humble there is nothing that IW can do / change to make TB work on your unraid. Unraid need to choose to support thunderbolt. This is a heavy lift given slackware doesn’t really seem to support it all (unraid is built on slackware).

The thunderbolt and thunderbolt-net driver are working perfectly in unraid 6.12.13 and IW hardware is working with them

The issue is there is no userland management components needed for thunderbolt, you need to bug unraid folks to support thunderbolt and add all that is missing from unraid/slackware.

00:0d.2 USB controller: Intel Corporation Alder Lake-P Thunderbolt 4 NHI #0 (rev 04) (prog-if 40 [USB4 Host Interface])
        DeviceName: Onboard - Other
        Subsystem: Device 2222:1111
        Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 16, IOMMU group 8
        Memory at 603d040000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=256K]
        Memory at 603d0b6000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]
        Capabilities: [80] Power Management version 3
        Capabilities: [88] MSI: Enable- Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit+
        Capabilities: [a0] MSI-X: Enable+ Count=16 Masked-
        Kernel driver in use: thunderbolt
        Kernel modules: thunderbolt

00:0d.3 USB controller: Intel Corporation Alder Lake-P Thunderbolt 4 NHI #1 (rev 04) (prog-if 40 [USB4 Host Interface])
        DeviceName: Onboard - Other
        Subsystem: Device 2222:1111
        Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 16, IOMMU group 8
        Memory at 603d000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=256K]
        Memory at 603d0b5000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]
        Capabilities: [80] Power Management version 3
        Capabilities: [88] MSI: Enable- Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit+
        Capabilities: [a0] MSI-X: Enable+ Count=16 Masked-
        Kernel driver in use: thunderbolt
        Kernel modules: thunderbolt

----edit—
oh hahah you got the same answer at unraid that they don’t support it
UnRaid 7 - Thunderbolt Networking - Hopeless support! - General Support - Unraid so no you know why it doesn’t work - exactly for the reason i said, you really have some huge overprivileged thinking you can demand answers from people and moan when you don’t get replies on forums.

Maybe if you were a little nicer to folks you might get some help and folks might be willing to go out on a limb and spend their valuable free time to help you. Also expecting IW to respond to a question about an OS they don’t support is either incredibly naive or just hilarious.

tl;dr the IW thunderbolt hardware in ZimaCube Pro is working 100% fine with unraid, the issue is unraid doesn’t support thunderbolt on ANY hardware

if you want thunderbolt install ZimaOS, Promox, Or any modern distribution derived from debian.

(or figure out for yourself how to create a boltd slackware package and install that)

interestingly the unraid TB drivers also see my eGPU and PCIE break out box with an BMC network card in it - though unraid becomes very unreliable, it needs a much later kernel or backports to fix most of the issues it has, with a rules file it looks like one might be able to bypass need for bolt.d - unclear. Also when one more thunderbolt devices is connected command like lspci and nvidia-smi crash unraid.

This is all works fine on other linux derivatives.

tl;dr thunderbolt is utterly broken in unraid 6 and the current unraid 7 betas.
unraid will have to do a lot of work to get it working

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