Wall of text -TL;DR Whoever maintains the NVM firmware broke TB1/2 compatibility, and they know they did it. So, why? Who do we blame, and how do we go about bugging them until they put it back? This is inexcusable.
I've had an ASUS Z690-based motherboard since December 2022. Specifically, the ASUS ROG Strix Z690-I Gaming WiFi board. I bought it solely because it had built-in Thunderbolt, which I use for audio production. The system is relatively minimalist - 12700K, GTX1080, 32GB, 2TB SSD. It is connected to a MOTU 828ES via an Apple TB3->TB2 adapter. All it does is audio work.
This configuration worked well for 15 months. The system was very stable and the audio latency via Thunderbolt was superb. I had no issues whatsoever with it.
ASUS recently released a BIOS update (2204) for my system, and after it was installed, none of my Thunderbolt audio gear works at all. It's like it isn't there. When I plug or unplug the devices at either end, windows doesn't acknowledge or ding or re-enumerate in device manager. Literally nothing happens.
I have updated every device driver, software, firmware, and tried every BIOS setting. Nothing changes. Many people on ASUS's forums are complaining about it, but they don't seem to have a clue. As I was attempting to see if I could hack out an older version of the Thunderbolt code from a BIOS I know worked into the latest version, I noticed today that there was a new statement on the BIOS download page for 2204:
"Thunderbolt 1/2 devices will no longer be supported by BIOS 2204 due to a change made by Intel® regarding the update of Thunderbolt firmware to NVM 36"
Say what?!? Why? Seriously, it worked fine and was stable. There's a metric crap-load of TB1/2 gear out there, some of which like my MOTU has no direct replacement via TB3. I can't buy an updated product that works with all my other MOTU AVB gear if I wanted to. They do not make it at all.
There are no TB2 PCIe cards that I've been able to find. As far as I can tell, only Apple and Startech make adapters from TB3 (USB-C) to TB2. Neither of these work now (I own both). All new motherboards for 12th and 13th gen CPUs are TB4 and have the same problem. All future motherboards will as well, since presumably this will affect all future chipset silicon.
The NVM team has literally paper-weighted thousands of devices without warning and, as far as I can tell, without reason.
If this is some kind of hardware security thing due to the DMA / Bus attachment on TB4, that's a very lame excuse. The hardware is in my audio gear closet in my house. If someone has enough access to plug in something nefarious, they can have it. If you want to add an option to disable TB1/2 compatibility for security, then do that. Make it the default for all I care. But at least give users who aren't in that situation the option. Right now you just look incompetent, like you couldn't maintain the codebase or something and gave up.
Please, tell me how I'm wrong here.
