Howdy! Got an observation with my setup, Lenovo T14 Gen6 + Lenovo Thunderbolt 4 dock + 4.3. Everything works great as long as the dock is connected at boot. If I remove the dock after the system is running, no problem devices are detached exactly as expected. If I attach or re-attach the dock after the system is running, it charges but does not detect the Dock or any of the other devices.
It does not exhibit this behavior in other OSs, wondering if this is a known/expected behavior of Qubes.
Hi @RuleOfSines
this is known behaviour. It requires the implementation of hotplug support for thunderbolt and pci in QubesOS.
See (for example) Automatically assign new PCIe devices to sys-usb without attaching to dom0 first · Issue #4426 · QubesOS/qubes-issues · GitHub
Ah I see, makes sense from what I follow. Inconvenient I suppose but not too problematic.
Same. However disabling TB PCI tunneling from BIOS seems to turn the ports into Type C with DP alt for me. And then I can hot plug stuff fine.
Not sure if it works for everyone.
Unfortunally, Lenovo Thinkpad have no such option in Bios. I have an P51, but i guess, the situation is the same on the posters system.
Do you need the TB part per se?
Most TB4/TB5 docks can work as Type C docks with DP Alt(MST).
If you want to try, hide the TB controller from dom0.
(I think it was ubes.rd.hide_pci or so). Or even blacklist the Thunderbolt kernel driver.
I believe it should allow you to then plug/unplug at will, because the dock would do backwards compatibility mode and work without establishing TB connections.
If you need Ethernet and it doesn’t work(because it’s PCI based and you’re running the Dock without TB), you could plug a USB dongle into the Dock.
Found this option in my Bios, and it does seem to work, as long as I boot the laptop with the dock connected. I can then disconnect and reconnect it. Going to see if that holds true. I can live without TB technically.
Edit: It only seems to work once, which I don’t quite understand.
Try using boltctl in dom0 to establish what’s happening. And block the TB driver from loading in dom0 if needed(or better yet hide the NHI controller with the qubes.rd.hide_pci).
I tried a few combinations of blocking the TB driver, hiding the device controller, disabling PCIe Passthrough in the BIOS, restarting sys-usb, nothing seemed to get a reliable ability to unplug and replug the dock. For now I’ve actually swapped out the dock with a Lenovo Universal USB-C dock and that works just fine. Unfortunate since the TB4 dock wasn’t cheap, but I still have it for tinkering.