Support for Lenovo Thinkpad USB-C Dock (Gen 2)

[Eurybus]

Hello,

I and probably many others have a Thinkpad dock from work laying around and it would be great to have full fledged support for it (Maybe even for the power button?). I did some preliminary testing and it seems to function as a USB hub, however the ethernet port and display outputs didn’t seem to work. In case of the the ethernet port it didn’t even show up in the system. My guess here is that this is a simple case of a missing driver. I did some digging in Arch forums and on Reddit and consensus was that the dock “just works” (tm) on Arch.
Would it be an impossible ask to get a support baked into the image for this dock?

Here’s the official Lenovo website for the dock: https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/solutions/acc500106-thinkpad-usb-c-dock-gen-2-overview-and-service-parts

Keep up the good work!

[HikariKnight]

From the looks of it, this seems to be a thunderbolt dock, which to my knowledge the steamdeck does not support.

So i doubt it will be able to fully support those docks as they use USB-C alt mode, better known as thunderbolt but the dock is designed i guess to at least give you access to the usb hub functionality (and maybe in best case 1 video output?) when connected to just normal usb3

the comments of it "just working" on arch might be from people who have thunderbolt ports (which uses the usb-c port) on their devices.

Now i would love to be wrong about this as i am just guessing based on what i read and one of my previous workplaces were in the process of replacing their docks with these and i vaguely remember all the laptops used with it had thunderbolt ports.

[ClassicGOD]

Originally posted by Eurybus:

...

Have you tried all display outs or just HDMI?

I have an HP USB-C G2 Dock. It's also 3 video output dock. I believe that this types of "higher end" docks share the same controller and on that controller the HDMI is implemented as a second stream of one of the DP outputs. Steam OS currently does not support that but when testing in Windows (I have an "Windows To Go" installation on an external drive) the output works just fine even with 4k60 (after Windows detects and installs the dock so if trying to recreate this test give it a few minutes). So I don't think it's an hardware limitation.

When using DP at least one of the ports should work.

I'm hopeful that support for this type of docs (at least the video outs) is coming as the Steam Deck Dock spec site seems to suggest that support for daisy-chained DP multi-stream transport is coming in an update.

I would love to use this dock for both my work PC and the deck as it would free one of the HDMI ports on my TV/monitor so + 1 for this feature request from me.