I wrote about Thunderbolt on Apple hardware a while ago. Since then Andreas Noever has somehow managed to write a working Thunderbolt stack , which awesome! But there was still the problem I mentioned of the device not appearing unless you passed acpi_osi="Darwin" on the kernel command line, and a further problem that if you suspended and then resumed it vanished again.The ACPI _OSI interface is a mechanism for the firmware to determine the OS that the system is running. It turns out that this works fine for operating systems that export fairly static interfaces (Windows, which adds a new _OSI per release) and poorly for operating systems that don't even guarantee any kind of interface stability in security releases (Linux, which claimed to be "Linux" regardless of version until we turned that off ). OS X claims to be Darwin and nothing else. As I mentioned before, claiming to be Darwin in addition to Windows was enough to get the Thunderbolt hardware to stay alive after boot, but it wasn't enough to get it powered up again after suspend.It turns out that there's two sections of ACPI code where this Mac checks _OSI. The first is something like:if (_OSI("Darwin")) Store 0x2710 OSYS; else if(_OSI("Windows 2009") Store 0x7D9 OSYS; else…ie, if the OS claims to be Darwin, all other strings are ignored. This is called from \_SB._INI(), which is the first ACPI method the kernel executes. The check for whether to power down the Thunderbolt controller occurs after this and then works correctly.The second version is less helpful. It's more like:if (_OSI("Darwin")) Store 0x2710 OSYS; if (_OSI("Windows 2009")) Store 0x7D9 OSYS; if…ie, if the OS claims to be both Darwin and Windows 2009 (which Linux will if you pass acpi_osi="Darwin"), the OSYS variable gets set to the Windows 2009 value. This version gets called during PCI initialisation, and once it's run all the other Thunderbolt ACPI calls stop doing anything and the controller gets powered down after suspend/resume. That can be fixed easily enough by special casing Darwin. If the platform requests Darwin before anything else, we'll just stop claiming to be Windows.Phew. Working Thunderbolt! ( Well, almost - _OSC fails and so we disable PCIe hotplug, but that's easy to work around). But boo, no working battery. Apple do something very strange with their ACPI battery interface. If you're running anything that doesn't claim to be Darwin, Apple expose an ACPI Control Method battery. Control Method interfaces abstract the complexity away into either ACPI bytecode or system management traps - the OS simply calls an ACPI method, magic happens and it gets an answer back. If you claim to be Darwin, Apple remove that interface and instead expose the raw ACPI Smart Battery System interface. This provides an i2c bus over which the OS must then speak the Smart Battery System protocol, allowing it to directly communicate with the battery.Linux has support for this, but it seems that this wasn't working so well and hadn't been for years . Loading the driver resulted in modprobe hanging until a timeout occurred, and most accesses to the battery would (a) take forever and (b) probably fail. It also had the nasty habit of breaking suspend and resume, which was unfortunate since getting Thunderbolt working over suspend and resume was the whole point of this exercise.So. I modified the sbs driver to dump every command it sent over the i2c bus and every response it got. Pretty quickly I found that the failing operation was a write - specifically, a write used to select which battery should be connected to the bus. Interestingly, Apple implemented their Control Method interface by just using ACPI bytecode to speak the SBS protocol. Looking at the code in question showed that they never issued any writes, and the battery worked fine anyway. So why were we writing? SBS provides a command to tell you the current state of the battery subsystem, including which battery (out of a maximum of 4) is currently selected. Unsurprisingly, calling this showed that the battery we wanted to talk to was already selected. We then asked the SBS manager to select it anyway, and the manager promptly fell off the bus and stopped talking to us. In keeping with the maxim of "If hardware complains when we do something, and if we don't really need to do that, don't do that", this makes it work Working Thunderbolt and working battery. We're even getting close to getting switchable GPU support working reasonably, which is probably just going to involve rewriting the entirety of fbcon or something similarly amusing.