Hello,

I am getting nowhere with support from either IceWhale or here regarding getting Thunderbolt networking to work on my ZimaCube Pro.

 

I have upgraded to version 7 with the kernel that supposedly supporting TB networking, yet, can't see any interfaces!

 

Please can someone help ....... please.

 

https://community.zimaspace.com/t/unraid-thunderbolt-networking/3375

 

Thunderbolt is not officially supported, and very few users ever tried it, so it won't be easy to get support here, it will be mostly trial and error.

This is not an IceWhale Issue, the hardware works perfectly well with the thunderbolt kernel driver included in latest unraid 6 and 7 beta..

The issue is the upstream slackware used for unraid doesn't have any meaningful support for thunderbolt in userland (i.e. not like debian derived OSs do). it theory it might be possible to compile and add something like Arc's bolt.d to slackware/unraid - but this seems unproven and i would guess a very heavy lift if the unraid team were to do it. And unclear if this would manage all the needed TB4/USB4 aspects (TB4 == USB4). Also not sure how big a job this is as I believe the Linux drivers in the kernel are developed against a Debian derived userland.  So i am certain once someone does this there will be new issues in the kernel that need to be fixed.

 

bolt daemon

 

I wouldn't see this coming to unraid anytime soon unless unraid chooses to add USB4 support as new USB4 disks and network adapaters come to market.

 

 

 

Edited September 19, 20241 yr by Scyto
added more info

On 9/19/2024 at 12:20 PM, Scyto said:

 

 

I wouldn't see this coming to unraid anytime soon unless unraid chooses to add USB4 support as new USB4 disks and network adapaters come to market.

 

 

 

Isn’t Unraid supposed to go Debian instead of Slackware some time soon? I thinks I read something about it…would it solve the problem?

23 minutes ago, Botafoguense1965 said:

Isn’t Unraid supposed to go Debian instead of Slackware some time soon? I thinks I read something about it…would it solve the problem?

This has never been said to my knowledge.

thank you for the replies ---- utter bonkers that it is not supported, particularly given the licensing fees we're being charged......

Thats the main reason I went to TrueNas in my main server and kept the Unraid as backup. Thunderbolt just works, and I get excellent speed for video/photo editing…now I wonder if I setup Ubuntu as virtual machine inside Unraid, I’ll be able to use the TB inside the VM…

Edited September 21, 20241 yr by Botafoguense1965

50 minutes ago, Botafoguense1965 said:

Thats the main reason I went to TrueNas in my main server

Thunderbolt is also not supported by TrueNAS, it may work with some devices or releases, and not others:

 

https://forums.truenas.com/t/thunderbolt-3-jbod-support-in-truenas/6748/12

1 hour ago, JorgeB said:

Thunderbolt is also not supported by TrueNAS, it may work with some devices or releases, and not others:

 

https://forums.truenas.com/t/thunderbolt-3-jbod-support-in-truenas/6748/12

Can’t speak for others. For me it worked right away. Connected the cables, configured a separate subnet and voila, appears as a SMB connection, with speed over 2gigs/sec…

And in the name of fairness, in Unraid, virtual machines were a breeze to setup and use. In TrueNAS, I can´t make them work properly, can´t even install Ubuntu. In OMV Thunderbolt worked, but when the machine went to sleep it would not wake up unless I rebooted the machine...so, every system will have its quirks, its a matter of finding out the best one for a specific scenario, unless you're  a Linux wizard, which I´m definitely not...

4 hours ago, JorgeB said:

Thunderbolt is also not supported by TrueNAS, it may work with some devices or releases, and not others:

 

https://forums.truenas.com/t/thunderbolt-3-jbod-support-in-truenas/6748/12

Everyone I speak too it’s worked out of the box. Also it’s free…. 
 

making my point again… surely a paid (expensive) alternative should have it too…

Unraid's former core design of a non-striped HDD array with a single cache pool, there probably wasn't much demand for Thunderbolt transfer speeds, since there'd be a bottleneck for the majority of storage. Compared to a TrueNAS always striped array.

 

But since Unraid has added features like multiple cache pools and ZFS, Thunderbolt support has a bigger use case now. And I imagine more users will be looking at Thunderbolt as an alternative to 10GbE. Since 10GbE is still an unusually expensive/premium add-on for desktop computers/Macs despite its age. I ended up on this forum post because I was looking at using thunderbolt instead of 10GbE

Edited November 19, 20241 yr by FrequencyLost

11 minutes ago, FrequencyLost said:

Unraid's former core design of a non-striped HDD array with a single cache pool, there probably wasn't much demand for Thunderbolt transfer speeds, since there'd be a bottleneck for the majority of storage. Compared to a TrueNAS always striped array.

 

But since Unraid has added features like multiple cache pools and ZFS, Thunderbolt support has a bigger use case now. And I imagine more users will be looking at Thunderbolt as an alternative to 10GbE. Since 10GbE is still an unusually expensive/premium add-on despite its age. I ended up on this forum post because I was looking at using thunderbolt instead of 10GbE

 I tried TB on Unrais with no success. I’m using it with no problems in True Nas. It’s great using it as both  DAS and NAS, specially for media editing. Most new commercial NAS systems now come with TB…

Edited November 19, 20241 yr by Botafoguense1965

anyone had any success?

Any progress on this? 

tried for years to push Limetech ... bery poor support on this one

Working on a plugin for this. Will put it up on CA store soon. I'm looking to leverage my dual 40gb/s links between two unraid hosts... It's WIP, but users can follow the development here: https://github.com/ibigsnet/ThunderboltNet

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/200065-plugin-thunderbolt-net-host-to-host-networking-over-thunderbolt-345-and-usb44v2/

Edited August 14Aug 14 by RifleJock

On 8/10/2026 at 9:28 PM, RifleJock said:

Working on a plugin for this. Will put it up on CA store soon. I'm looking to leverage my dual 40gb/s links between two unraid hosts... It's WIP, but users can follow the development here: https://github.com/ibigsnet/ThunderboltNet

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/200065-plugin-thunderbolt-net-host-to-host-networking-over-thunderbolt-345-and-usb44v2/

Unraid 7.3.2 · TB4 (Alder Lake-P) · macOS peer (Apple Silicon, Mac17,6)

First off — thanks for this. Getting host-to-host working manually was fiddly, and having the tbn tab handle the interface plus the services include list is a big improvement.

Working well: peer detection and naming, trained rate reporting (20 Gb/s full-duplex, 2-lane), and the "Include listening interface" option — Samba rebinds to the TB IP on Apply without me touching rc.samba. Measured 25.3 Gbit/s Mac→Cube and 29.4 Gbit/s Cube→Mac with iperf3, zero retransmits, MTU 1500 both ends. Direct cable. Through a Dell SD25TB4 dock it caps hard at 9.85 Gbit/s, consistent with your note about docks not being TB switches.

Issue: config not reapplied after reboot or link drop.

Steps: set static IPv4 on tbn0, Apply — works, interface UP with address, services bound. Reboot the server with the Mac still cabled. After boot, 1-1 and 1-1.0 are both present in /sys/bus/thunderbolt/devices/, and thunderbolt0 exists — but it's DOWN with no address, and Samba binds only to the LAN IP. A manual Apply on the tbn0 tab fixes it every time.

Same thing happens on any link drop — changing the peer's IP config, or unplugging and reconnecting.

One possibly relevant detail: the interface MAC is regenerated on each link establishment (I've seen 02:e3:0a:90:38:61, 02:e2:02:28:f5:9d, 02:f3:08:39:98:71, 02:fd:da:8b:66:41 across sessions). If known-peer matching keys on the local MAC, that might explain why the saved config isn't reapplied.

Also saw the address field revert to the plugin default (10.255.0.x) after a reboot rather than keeping what I'd entered, though I may have caught it mid-apply.

Happy to pull diagnostics if useful.

On 8/15/2026 at 1:19 PM, Vinney said:

First off — thanks for this. Getting host-to-host w

Awesome to hear your experiences!

I'll look further into the issues you've brought up. I got a better thunderbolt cable in today, also getting a tablet with good Thunderbolt tomorrow. I'll do some further testing and see if I can resolve the needing to re-apply, as well as rolling MACs.

Should be some updates from me soon! We can probably wait on your diagnostics for now. I'll let you know though!


PS
Oh, just seeing your responses as well over in the plugin support page as well.