Thunderbolt, not Thunderbird.

When you connect two computers via a Thunderbolt cable, Thunderbolt to 
Thunderbolt, the driver should automatically create a virtual ethernet 
interface on both of them. It supports surprisingly huge MTUs. 
https://lwn.net/Articles/734019/

Back in 2021 the connection worked for me, transiently, but then caused a 
kernel panic under load. (Of course I was testing giant MTUs and iperf.) I 
haven’t tried it since then. It was an AMD platform, but its Thunderbolt chips 
were all made by Intel anyway.

Just give it a try: Make the cable connection, check e.g. "ip link show" if 
anything gets added there, then bring the new interface up on both sides ("ip 
link set <device> up"), give it an IP address from a common range, e.g. "ip 
addr add fc00::a/64 dev <device>" on one machine and fc00::b/64 on the other, 
then try a ping, iperf and all that.

IIRC iperf did show something significantly above 10 Gb/s, but it wastn’t the 
maximum theoretical Thunderbolt speed.

Cheers,
Andrej


----- Original Message -----
From: Patrick O'Callaghan <[email protected]>
Sent: 31.01.2026 - 14:26
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Ethernet over Thunderbird/USB4 ?

> On Sat, 2026-01-31 at 07:39 +0100, listy via users wrote:
>> Hi guys.
>> Do you have any experience to share, using TB &| USB4 as 
>> ethernet link - bits I'm interested in: claims that AMD 
>> platform is more wobbly(with lower speeds) than Intel's - 
>> anybody?
> 
> What does Thunderbird have to do with an Ethernet link?
> 
> poc
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