"No thunderbolt 3 support" Ubuntu 18.04

Why do I get this message on my Lenovo Y720 laptop? I have a thunderbolt 3 port, but for some reason it says this:

I don't suppose it's because I have no cable inserted.

• Secure boot is disabled
• Fast boot is disabled
• AHCI mode enabled
• UEFI mode enabled
• The port works if I connect to my phone, but I cannot test it with another thunderbolt device as I do not have any.

Not sure if you're still looking for an answer, but I ran into this same issue and got it working.

I'm running Ubuntu Budgie 18.04.1 and it seemed to be missing the bolt package.

If you're also missing the package, running the command

sudo apt install bolt

and then a restart should give you the ability to access your thunderbolt settings.

And no, even with no devices plugged in, you should still be able to see the controls.

Edit: Another thing you can do is run lspci -tv and look to see if the thunderbolt ports are even recognized by the system.

Thunderbolt controllers in BIOS-assisted enumeration mode go to sleep when not in use. All that is left is a PCI hotplug bridge with no child bridges attached.

The Thunderbolt controllers that break this rule are:

• Titan Ridge
• Presumably any future controllers released after Titan Ridge
• Some Alpine Ridge controllers with updated firmware and BIOS to support (uncommon)

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/thunderbolt.html

From the above link, we find a command to force the power and wake the controller (usually used for firmware updates without requiring Thunderbolt devices to be attached).

"echo 1 | sudo tee /sys/bus/wmi/devices/86CCFD48-205E-4A77-9C48-2021CBEDE341/force_power" without the quotes, should wake it up. Then "lspci -vnnt" to visualise the difference. If you want, you can post the output of "lspci -vnnt" for us to confirm for you.

But this only works on recent kernels. I cannot remember which one was the first, but 4.20 most definitely has it (and definitely some earlier ones but for the sake of simplicity, just use that one).

Hopefully this works and allows for your Thunderbolt controller to be acknowledged by Ubuntu. However, since you said you do not have any Thunderbolt devices, I am not sure why you care (although I do not say that discouragingly). But that should be the solution.

Oh, and remember, if you have another Thunderbolt 3 laptop and a USB-C to USB-C cable with USB 3.X speeds, you should be able to connect the two laptops together via their Thunderbolt ports, which will wake the controllers and result in emulated 10GbE networking in between them. If they are both Linux then you will have to "sudo modprobe thunderbolt-net" on one of them.

Adding my answer here since nothing else worked for me. I have a dual boot ubuntu 20.04 and Windows 10 on an Alienware R4. Could not detect thunderbolt on ubuntu, but could on Windows 10. I logged into windows 10 and upgraded both the BIOS firmware and the thunderbolt firmware. Not sure which one of the two actually fixed it, but my thunderbolt is now recognized.