How do you turn on thunderbolt?

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1

Using USB4/Thunderbolt, I connect an external SSD drive to a laptop, but it is not detected in the system, and is determined via USB A.
In another linux distro on this laptop TB4 works.

How to disable the system setting blocking thunderbolt?
What are the risks of enabling this setting considering I have a modern 2026 laptop with the latest bios update

2

Edit /etc/modprobe.d/30_security-misc_disable.conf, then look for the following block in the file:

## Thunderbolt:
## Disable Thunderbolt modules to prevent certain DMA attacks.
##
## https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbolt_(interface)#Security_vulnerabilities
##
install intel-wmi-thunderbolt /usr/bin/disabled-thunderbolt-by-security-misc
install thunderbolt /usr/bin/disabled-thunderbolt-by-security-misc
install thunderbolt_net /usr/bin/disabled-thunderbolt-by-security-misc

Comment out the three lines starting with install by adding a # character to the start of each line. Save your changes to the file, then reboot.

Unsure. It may depend on your specific hardware and hardware vendor (i.e. does the hardware’s IOMMU work right), and there may be unknown vulnerabilities in Thunderbolt in general. Thunderbolt (interface) - Wikipedia has a list of some known issues, which may or may not be mitigated on various machines. (Suffice to say, exposing a PCIe interface on a USB port has proven to be somewhat of a bad idea.)

FWIW, I have a USB-C SSD enclosure that does not use Thunderbolt. It works without issues even when plugged into a Thunderbolt port. It obviously isn’t as fast, but it’s likely less of a security hazard.

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