i am desperate for help. I am trying to build a USB4NET cluster out of 3 Minisforum NPB7. I used this guide Thunderbolt Networking Setup · GitHub but i can’t get USB4NET to work. When i plug the NBP7 into each other there is no event in udevadm monitor. When i plug them into my laptop which has thunderbolt 4 all events show and the interfaces are detected as network interfaces.
I don’t know what i should do to fix that. I tryed around with boltctl commands but that doesn’t helped. Can somebody please help me?
I can see the thunderbolt controllers with bolctl list -a and both the thunderbolt_net and thunderbolt modules are loaded correctly. I also tried with multiple USB4 and Thunderbolt4 cables to no avail.
I believe this is a firmware/BIOS issue on the minisforum side, I have emailed their support contact, let’s see if they can investigate on this. I suggest you to do the same.
boltctl list -a output
● INTEL Gen12
├─ type: host
├─ name: Gen12
├─ vendor: INTEL
├─ uuid: db408780-f144-7ef1-ffff-ffffffffffff
├─ generation: USB4
├─ status: authorized
│ ├─ domain: db408780-f144-7ef1-ffff-ffffffffffff
│ └─ authflags: none
├─ authorized: Wed 03 Jan 2024 05:35:17 PM UTC
├─ connected: Wed 03 Jan 2024 05:35:17 PM UTC
└─ stored: no
Minisforum came back saying this connection mode is not supported on NPB5/NPB7 and other models.
It seems that you can’t connect 2 hosts together via usb4/thunderbolt but in theory you can connect to another thunderbolt device (I haven’t tested this yet). Based on that, we are SOL.
The only other option I can think of to connect those 2 mini pc at high speed, is the use of a thundebolt 10gbit ethernet or SFP+ adapter (but it’s 30gbit slower and those are usually expensive)
