AMD prepares more improvements around USB4/Thunderbolt devices under Linux

AMD prepares more improvements around USB4/Thunderbolt devices under Linux

AMD prepares more improvements around USB4/Thunderbolt devices under Linux

As part of the specification for AMD Rembrandt APUs to support USB4 and Thunderbolt 3 based protocols, AMD has been working on some Linux driver improvements in recent months to strengthen USB4/Thunderbolt support for its platforms.

AMD‘s recent patch series includes USB4 DisplayPort channels and other USB4/Thunderbolt work.

Their latest effort is to refactor the various Linux kernels around the “is_thunderbolt” check, if the device is connected via Thunderbolt, rather than directly via PCIe, a driver inside the kernel will change its behavior and act as a way to determine if the device is likely to be A means of removing/external connections. The is_thunderbolt check process was originally designed for early Intel Thunderbolt controllers, and it does not contain a command to complete this event.

AMD Linux engineer Mario Limonciello has released several revisions of the “is_thunderbolt” series of patches over the past week, so the final expected driver behavior covers “USB4 designs that didn’t come from Intel” (aka AMD).

The is_thunderbolt check is considered unconventional, and various other Thunderbolt-related kernel code changes are also part of the proposed patch series.

As part of 12 patches, this patch also cleans up AMD and Nouveau driver code involving eGPU/removable GPU support and other quirky paths.

See this patch series for more details:

https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2022-February/341724.html

It can be seen that AMD is making more USB4/Thunderbolt processing improvements for Linux to improve performance under non-Intel platforms, and AMD’s USB4 is being introduced with the Ryzen 6000 mobile series APUs.