Problem with the docking station

User Support
1

Hello,
I have a Lenovo Thinkpad Hybrid USB-c with USB-a dock.

My configuration? I connect 2x DP monitors, a mouse and a USB keyboard to the dock.
I connect the Thinkpad docking station on one side with USB-c and connect it to the computer with the same USB-c cable.
The cable has a bandwidth of 10GB/s and works on Windows.

Behaviour: after connecting the station to the computer and then trying to load qubes, the computer restarts before the login screen appears.

After disconnecting all devices from the docking station, the problem still occurs.

After disconnecting the docking station from the computer, qubes started.
So I log into qubes - everything works fine.
Then I connect the docking station to the computer using USB-c - qubes works. I connect the keyboard and mouse to the docking station - qubes works, the mouse and keyboard are detected correctly.

However, when I connect DP monitors to the docking station, qubes does not see them.

  1. How can I change this?
  2. The second question, from a technical point of view: how do you actually debug it, which logs should you check?
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2

From your description it sounds like there is some kind of short on the connecting screen that is causing your computer to restart and are not working when the OS boots up.
Have you trying connecting a different monitor to test, or maybe connect the same monitor but on a the HDMI output if available.

There might also be some weird BIOS setting that might be conflicting, but I wouldn’t bet money on that.

When did this start happening? Was it working before?

3

That docking station is not a usb-c only docking station, it is a thunderbolt docking station.
The monitors are not connected via usb-c, they are connected via thunderbolt.
And thunderbolt is a pci device, no matter, that the cables looks identical.
If you connect the docking station on boot time, the thunderbolt controller is detected.
Later, if you connect the docking station during qubes os runs, only the usb-c-part is detected, so mouse and keyboard (and maybe usb storage devices) are detected, but pci-devices not.
Thats an known behaviour on qubes.
Windows has some magic to detect and connect pci devices on the fly, Qubes OS has not such functionality (yet).

4

Ahem, no. No display will be detected, no matter which functionality), if you connect the docking station after start of Qubes OS. Such functionality will require PCI hotplug, that’s not implemented in Qubes (and XEN) in the current versions.
See Enable PCIe hotplug in dom0 · Issue #6620 · QubesOS/qubes-issues · GitHub
And marmareks comments on Automatically assign new PCIe devices to sys-usb without attaching to dom0 first · Issue #4426 · QubesOS/qubes-issues · GitHub

1 Like
5

Hi,

The station is connected on both sides via USB-C. I don’t know where you found the information that I had devices connected via Thunderbolt.

There is USB-C on both sides of the cable.
This docking station does not support Thunderbolt.

6

It seems that it’s DisplayLink device so it needs driver.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/ci1s4l/monitors_not_working_with_lenovo_usbc_hybrid/?rdt=54347

https://support.displaylink.com/knowledgebase/articles/679060-porting-the-displaylink-ubuntu-driver-to-other-lin

Sell it and buy something without DisplayLink chip (hard, most docks have it).

7

Hmm, yes, is see.
It is the USB-C Hybrid Docking Station, not the TB one.
The connectors of USB-C and Thunderbolt are the same, i have the one with TB4. These DS behaves, as i described, but yours seems to be a true USB-C-only DS.
Sorry.