It appears that for certain thunderbolt 4 controllers, Intel have completely disabled compatibility with thunderbolt 1&2 devices now…
Understand that for YEARS these controllers have worked just fine with legacy devices, until Intel have forcibly disabled them now with these newer tb controller firmware images.
The problem is, these controller firmwares are updated without any warning to the user, and there appears to be no way to go back.
Which means potentially tens of thousands of dollars worth of high end audio / video / networking gear being turned into bricks.
At least ASUS now has a warning in their bios update notes – HP has nothing.
I’m working with an HP Z2 Mini G9 thunderbolt module, it’s a maple ridge JHL8340/1134 controller, and the NVM firmware image that actually worked with thunderbolt 2 devices was version 31.0.
The version it updated itself to is now at 39.3, and this is the one that doesn’t work. On ASUS forums, they are saying version 36 and beyond also kills compatibility with older devices.
There doesn’t appear to be any way to contact anyone working at Intel in the thunderbolt group, and HP tech support are completely useless.
Can anyone help please? If anyone out there perhaps has a maple ridge controller, running an older firmware, could you maybe dump it?
Instructions for that are in the Linux kernel “thunderbolt & USB4 guide”
No clue if it’s possible on Windows
I’ve tried to look into this myself and I can’t figure out where the actual firmware image is stored…I’ve tried rolling back the bios, and that is not reverting the thunderbolt chip firmware. I don’t even see the thunderbolt chip firmware image in the bios image package, though I do see the USB controller firmware in there! I’ve seen some forum posts about the ASUS fw image being embedded inside the actual bios, with seemingly no way to extract it. If that’s the case here, then I think it’s safe to say that I’m screwed.
EDIT: Looks like that’s the case for HP as well. I’m on Ubuntu now and I can see the notes for the firmware image say that it has the thunderbolt fw inside of the system firmware image. The older system firmware images that are available don’t contain the older thunderbolt firmware images either. I guess I’m screwed.
I’ve been down for a couple days now and the only plan I’ve got is ordering another one of these thunderbolt modules and hoping this one ships with the older firmware. But even then, what happens if it decides to update itself? There’s no way to go back!