Intel Icelake Thunderbolt Support Still Being Squared Away For Linux - Hopefully For 5.4

Intel Icelake laptops will soon be hitting store shelves and a vast majority of the Linux support has been squared away for many months. Unfortunately one bit still not mainlined is the Thunderbolt support.

Back in July we wrote about the Icelake Thunderbolt support still not merged yet while Icelake's Gen11 graphics and other new processor features have all been squared away for several kernel releases in ensuring good launch-day support. With Icelake, the Thunderbolt functionality has moved onto the SoC itself (sans the Thunderbolt power delivery) and that's taken additional time for getting the Linux kernel support in order.

Intel's Linux Thunderbolt guru, Mika Westerberg, sent out the third revision of the Icelake patches on Monday morning. While Icelake's Thunderbolt controller is on the SoC itself, the implementation from the driver perspective is still fairly similar to the existing Titan Ridge controller but with some differences like leaving security levels up to the IOMMU.

The Thunderbolt Icelake V3 patches can be found on the kernel mailing list while they will hopefully be mainlined next month for the Linux 5.4 merge window and that in turn will reach stable in November. Sadly this means no Icelake Thunderbolt support for the autumn Linux distributions unless any of them end up back-porting the support to their earlier kernels.