TB15 Dock Linux Support

As Jared mentioned IT IS POSSIBLE to do laptop BIOS UPDATE IN LINUX.

You can either save the BIOS update (.exe) directly under /boot/efi or on a USB stick and then reboot laptop, hit F12 and choose "Upgrade BIOS". From there select the BIOS update .exe file and voila! No need of Windows. That's how I did mine.

NOTE: this is for laptop BIOS update, not for drivers and such.

It sounds like he was referring to updating the Thunderbolt 3 firmware, not the BIOS.

That is correct.

BIOS update performed on the computer itself via the boot options.

Firmware for Dock performed on a Windows machine as no other means available to do this.

Update on so far.

My initial enthusiasm was tempered by daily use.

Using 14.04 with all available updates, screen resolution would come and go.  Detaching the laptop from the dock would not guarantee the same resolution when re-attached.  Sometimes 1024x768 was all that was provided.  Network access via cable was hit and miss too.  Sometimes it worked, sometimes not.

It wasn't possible to easily update the laptop to 15.10 or higher.  A black screen during the update due to a Skylake issue prevented the video from working and letting me see what was happening.  Updating via a SSH session did work until a known bluetooth issue stalled the update forcing me to quit DPKG and rerun it.  After 15.10 was installed, I updated to 16.04 the same way.  This time video and bluetooth did not crash and the screen stayed up.

After 16.04 was installed I reattached to the dock.  Screen resolutions this time are correct but fonts size is huge until I close the laptop lid forcing the big screen only.  Fonts then reset back to correct size.  Resolution is retained.  So far this bit looks okay.

Network through the dock is still hit and miss.  Sometimes it works.  Mostly it doesn't.  I have wifi from the laptop ethernet is faster and better so it takes a few reboots and prayers to the Network God to get this working.

USB does work.

Allowing the laptop to sleep after inactivity is bad.  This will require switching the laptop off and on again.  It just gets very confused.

We are still in need of better drivers, but until written we have what we have.

Ethernet through the dock in Linux seems to have major issues. Here is a kernel log trace of when the network goes down (always happens during a high-bandwith transfer): gist.github.com/.../e673585bcd5bf2d108a21264f91bfb92

Here is my update as promised:

Double monitor works fine.

Ethernet stopped giving me problems. No idea what was causing that before, but I can't seem to break it now.

Audio sounds good, no issues that I can tell.

USB seems to work fine. Although I had an OTA sideload freeze via my USB hub. I doubt it was the dock that caused this, but felt like I should mention that I haven't had 100% success.

The only remaining annoyance for me is the process for getting it to work. Can't hot plug. Have to unplug and power off the dock between each use. etc. But, that's pretty minor stuff for me. I'm sure things will continue to improve with driver/firmware updates.

Edit: Forgot to mention that I'm now on kernel 4.6.4. I don't think it changed any behavior, but worth making note of.

Also, can somebody take a look at the 9350 driver page? If I remember right, some of the drivers/firmware pertaining to the dock/thunderbolt have been updated again since the big update that made it functional. Those dates look slightly later than I remember.

Ethernet stopped giving me problems. No idea what was causing that before, but I can't seem to break it now.

I'm surprised that your ethernet is working (are you sure your wifi is shut off when testing?). Is your dock port connection at 100Mb/s or 1000Mb/s? Could you please run the following command in a terminal to check for errors?

wget https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v4.x/linux-4.6.4.tar.xz

Thanks!

I have found a workaround for the broken Ethernet in our docks, force the linespeed to 100Mb/s. Assuming your Ethernet adapter is eth0, run the following two commands as superuser:

mii-tool -F 100baseTx-FD eth0
ethtool -s eth0 speed 100 duplex full

This seems to slow traffic down enough that the adapter doesn't *** out any more.

My Ethernet connection is 1000Mb/s.

Recently, I have used it when I know for sure that WiFi was turned off in addition to the connection showing wired. However, today when I did my most recent testing I believe WiFi was enabled. But again, it was showing as connected via Ethernet. Also, my speedtest results and CS:GO ping looked like wired connection, not WiFi. I even downloaded a 1GB file this morning and all was good.

I'll test it again tonight when I get home and ensure that WiFi is disabled.

WiFi disabled and my ethernet port is good. I tried the wget on the file that GREYLTC posted and it downloaded in 15s at an average rate of 5.85MB/s.

Not sure what the difference is for us here. I don't think I've done anything special. I didn't even try to troubleshoot those initial ethernet issues. They just went away.

WiFi disabled and my ethernet port is good. I tried the wget on the file that GREYLTC posted and it downloaded in 15s at an average rate of 5.85MB/s.

My Ethernet seems to *** out (see kernel trace in my previous post) if my transfer rate goes above 10MB/s.

I think the difference is our internet connections. My 50Mb/s connection isn't enough to overload the ethernet port. However, doing a scp on my local LAN immediately maxes it out and the transfer fails. Works fine over WiFi. It doesn't necessarily cause the connection to fail every time, but it can't complete the transfer.

Also, the display adapters I use seem to matter. The mDP is giving me issues with my second monitor. HDMI and VGA work fine. I'll have to do more testing to narrow that down.

Further nuances:

Ethernet still won't do anything at Gbps speeds downstream. However, upstream works fine. I've been transferring MKV files at 110MB/s to my server all night. Same thing fails when downloading from the server to my laptop.

I switched my secondary monitor to HDMI from mDP. Works fine now with no flicker. So, if you are having issues with your displays, the connector/cable type may make a difference. For clarification, I'm now using DP and HDMI with success.

Yay, this is great news that the TB15 has started working in Linux! I also have confirmed it working (as of just now) with the following:

- Latest BIOS (Dell XPS 15 9550 A10 System BIOS), upgraded by placing the .exe in /boot/efi and using the BIOS update option at boot time.

- I had already updated my Thunderbolt firmware (Intel(R) Thunderbolt(TM) 3 Firmware Update), needs to be done through WIndows currently.

- Ubuntu 16.10, kernel 4.4.14

Things are definitely a little finicky. I got kernel panics every time I plugged in initially. I think unplugging everything did the trick (I had been running Windows with everything working previously).

I'll update the initial post with the current status of things. This is so excellent to have gotten even this far.

The repository for Thunderbolt 3 support as a daemon and in the kernel seems to have been made public as well: https://github.com/01org/thunderbolt-software-daemon/issues/2

Have somebody tried with success all this updates but using the TB15 with a XPS 13 9350 updated to his latest bios 1.4.4?