I have several 2015 13” MacBook Airs in various states of disrepair that I run Debian on as part of my home testing cluster. Given they don’t have ethernet ports, I’ve usually used USB network adapters because they are generally well-supported. One of my machines however, has a broken USB interface and I was unable to use this. I’d put it on a shelf to use for parts, but I found an Apple Thunderbolt to Gigabit Ethernet Adapter and figured I’d give that a whirl. Not surprisingly, Linux worked pretty seamlessly on 7+ year old technology.
After plugging it in, nothing happened. A bit of quick googling found that I needed the thunderbolt and tg3 kernel modules, so I added them with:
modprobe tg3 thunderbolt
The device now showed up under dmesg and lspci --nnk
0a:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries NetXtreme BCM57762 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe [14e4:1682]
Subsystem: Apple Inc. Thunderbolt to Gigabit Ethernet Adapter [106b:00f6]
Kernel driver in use: tg3
Kernel modules: tg3
But the network interface was not enabled according to ip address. I added the following to /etc/network/interfaces
# Thunderbolt
allow-hotplug ens9
iface ens9 inet dhcp
restarted my network and I was now connected via DHCP.
2: ens9: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc mq state UP group default qlen 1000
link/ether 68:5b:35:9d:a5:25 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
altname enp10s0
inet 10.0.0.22/24 brd 10.0.0.255 scope global dynamic ens9
valid_lft 84917sec preferred_lft 84917sec
inet6 fe80::6a5b:35ff:fe9d:a525/64 scope link
valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
It works after rebooting and I now have another machine for my cluster (“yancy”).