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People keep saying that thunderbolt/usb4 networking Just Works, so I went and tried. I plugged my PC (ubuntu 23.10, Maple Ridge) into my NAS (ubuntu 23.10, Mapl

People keep saying that thunderbolt/usb4 networking Just Works, so I went and tried. I plugged my PC (ubuntu 23.10, Maple Ridge) into my NAS (ubuntu 23.10, Maple Ridge) with my good USB4 cable which I just tested to have full connectivity on my LED tester and transfer above USB3 speeds to my NVMe enclosure. No network interfaces appeared. I also tried plugging my PC into my M2 macbook and again no network interfaces appeared on either end. I booted into Windows and tried PC-NAS and PC-Macbook. No auto-configured network interfaces. Windows did make the "connect" sound with the Macbook, but that was it. Until connecting the computers by USB4 results in: 0. Drivers already installed and configured without additional effort 1. Automatic appearance of network interfaces 2. Automatic configuration of network interfaces for peer connectivity 3. Automatic peer and service discovery on auto-configured network 4. Automatic presentation of sharing options through a popup or other icon 5. At least some of those options actually work. then it shouldn't be called automatic, "already done," "super solved," or any related phrases. Linux can probably get away with having a few of those steps broken by default, but for everyone else 0-5 above are minimum viable. I'm not even including things that really ought to happen like bad cable detection. The theoretical possibility of getting this to work if you are willing to compile custom drivers, learn an undocumented configuration format, iterate a few times with it, and then proceed to do 1-5 above manually is so far from being minimally viable for public consumption that it might as well not exist and definitely does not deserve any of the praise being heaped upon it here. From the user perspective, it is approximately 0% done, not 100% done.

jauntywundrkind 2y ago
Based off guides like https://gist.github.com/scyto/67fdc9a517faefa68f730f82d7fa3570 https://gist.github.com/scyto/67fdc9a517faefa68f730f82d7fa35... it seems likely that thunderbolt-net module isn't being loaded by udev. Or it seems like none of these things you are plugging into are loading thunderbolt networking on their side. Can you try modprobe-ing the module and seeing if you see the network device? Should take nothing more than that As for network connectivity/configuration, there's going to be a lot of different options depending on daemons. I tend to think NetworkManager is the most likely to do something. But anyone who brings the interface up should get link local which should be good enough for these use cases.
GeekyBear 2y ago
As far as I've seen, you've always had to know enough to manually configure the network settings and then configure file sharing to work on top of that. Which us why you need those user facing features like Airdrop or Target Disk mode to automatically handle the networking and file sharing details for the unsophisticated users. Airdrop will continue to work even if there are no existing cellular or WiFi networks available. The devices will just create their own ad hoc WiFi network on the fly, without the user needing to know a thing about how it works.

jauntywundrkind 2y ago

Based off guides like https://gist.github.com/scyto/67fdc9a517faefa68f730f82d7fa3570 https://gist.github.com/scyto/67fdc9a517faefa68f730f82d7fa35... it seems likely that thunderbolt-net module isn't being loaded by udev. Or it seems like none of these things you are plugging into are loading thunderbolt networking on their side. Can you try modprobe-ing the module and seeing if you see the network device? Should take nothing more than that As for network connectivity/configuration, there's going to be a lot of different options depending on daemons. I tend to think NetworkManager is the most likely to do something. But anyone who brings the interface up should get link local which should be good enough for these use cases.

GeekyBear 2y ago

As far as I've seen, you've always had to know enough to manually configure the network settings and then configure file sharing to work on top of that. Which us why you need those user facing features like Airdrop or Target Disk mode to automatically handle the networking and file sharing details for the unsophisticated users. Airdrop will continue to work even if there are no existing cellular or WiFi networks available. The devices will just create their own ad hoc WiFi network on the fly, without the user needing to know a thing about how it works.