thunderbolt-net

Modern computers have one or more Thunderbolt ports. One of the features of the Thunderbolt protocol is the use of a high-speed TCP/IP network over it. It would be nice to have such option in Alpine out of the box. But currently there is no thunderbolt-net module in Alpine 3.14.

# modprobe thunderbolt-net
modprobe: module thunderbolt-net not found in modules.dep

This module may be enabled with CONFIG_USB4_NET (CONFIG_THUNDERBOLT_NET in previous versions of the kernel).

Symbol: USB4_NET [=m]
Type  : tristate
Defined at drivers/net/Kconfig:568
  Prompt: Networking over USB4 and Thunderbolt cables
  Depends on: NETDEVICES [=y] && USB4 [=m] && INET [=y]
  Location:
    -> Device Drivers
(5)   -> Network device support (NETDEVICES [=y])

In fact, it is already available on the edge kernel.

File	Package	Branch	Repository	Architecture
/lib/modules/5.15.1-0-edge/kernel/drivers/net/thunderbolt-net.ko	linux-edge	edge	community	x86_64
/lib/modules/5.15.1-0-edge/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/intel/wmi/intel-wmi-thunderbolt.ko	linux-edge	edge	community	x86_64
/lib/modules/5.15.1-0-edge/kernel/drivers/thunderbolt/thunderbolt.ko	linux-edge	edge	community	x86_64
/lib/modules/5.15.1-3-lts/kernel/drivers/platform/x86/intel/wmi/intel-wmi-thunderbolt.ko.gz	linux-lts	edge	main	x86_64

I plan to test it on Rocket Lake and Tiger Lake platforms on the weekend. I will write the results here.

It would be nice to get this module in a non-edge kernel before the 3.15 release. Thank you for attention.