{"id":3114,"date":"2013-11-07T19:22:12","date_gmt":"2013-11-07T19:22:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/really.zonky.org\/?p=3114"},"modified":"2013-11-07T19:48:44","modified_gmt":"2013-11-07T19:48:44","slug":"osx-the-thunderbolt-bridge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/?p=3114","title":{"rendered":"OSX: The “Thunderbolt Bridge”"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am not aware of how widely it has been publicised, but it was certainly a surprise to me … and a few others. After upgrading to OSX 10.9 (Mavericks), and when going into the “Network Settings”, a new network device appeared. Specifically something called the “Thunderbolt Bridge”.<\/p>\n

It turns out that this is a new feature of OSX where you can connect two Macs (or potentially other kinds of system) together with a thunderbolt cable, and run IP over that connection. Which is\u00a0fast<\/em> compared with normal ethernet, although it is comparable with 10GE and slower than 40GE, and 100GE (and of course slower than modern InfiniBand).<\/p>\n

But it probably isn’t as usable as 10GE at present for the following reasons :-<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. There’s no networking hardware support for thunderbolt networks at present.<\/li>\n
  2. The cables are different, so offices would have to be rewired for it. Which would be very expensive.<\/li>\n
  3. It turns out that thunderbolt takes a\u00a0lot<\/em> of processor power to run networking at that speed.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    That’s not to say it won’t make a fine way to connect two Macs together for data transfers. With any luck (unfortunately I can’t test it), it should be a case of just plugging the two Macs together and using normal sharing mechanisms to do a transfer. Both sides should automatically configure an IP address, so normal networking services should be able to see the other Mac across the “Thunderbolt Bridge”.<\/p>\n

    The only problem with this new feature is the name – “Thunderbolt Bridge” – which might be user-friendly, but is likely to make networking people flinch. User configured network bridges have been known to cause problems!<\/p>\n

    For more details have a look here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I am not aware of how widely it has been publicised, but it was certainly a surprise to me … and a few others. After upgrading to OSX 10.9 (Mavericks), and when going into the “Network Settings”, a new network device appeared. Specifically something called the “Thunderbolt Bridge”. It turns out that this is a […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4],"tags":[1149,170,1150,1151],"class_list":["post-3114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-it","tag-mavericks","tag-osx","tag-thunderbolt","tag-thunderbolt-bridge","category-4-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1f2KI-Oe","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3114"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3114\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3117,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3114\/revisions\/3117"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}