As part of today's USB/Thunderbolt subsystem updates for the ongoing Linux 7.2 kernel merge window, USB4STREAM was merged as a nifty and exciting addition to opening up some interesting USB4 connnectivity use-cases for high speed, low latency data transfers.

Back in May, Phoronix was first to report on Intel developing the USB4STREAM protocol for Linux as a "super simple" way for transferring raw packets from one host to another via USB4 / Thunderbolt.

USB4STREAM opens up not only speedy file transfers between systems but could also be used for other high speed uses like sharing of web cameras between systems and any other raw data transfers. Any application making use of read/write could interact with the new /dev/tbstreamX devices for opening up a range of innovative uses.

As I noted back in May, the USB4STREAM support was lining up for Linux 7.2 and it indeed happened. It was sent out today as part of the USB/Thunderbolt changes and it was already merged to Git master without any objections by Linus Torvalds.

The USB pull also includes other routine Thunderbolt updates, improving multi-display DisplayPort tunnel allocation with Thunderbolt, and the new AMD Promontory 21 chipset xHCI controller temperature driver created in part by OpenAI's coding agent.