[kalleboo]

Hot-plugging Thunderbolt devices is hardly an edge-case on Macs, it's a heavily advertised feature.

I had about weekly kernel panics or machine freezes (would not wake from sleep) while unplugging my Thunderbolt dock (with displays and lots of devices) all throughout the USB-C Intel Mac era, but they all went away when I got an M1 Pro machine, so I wonder how much is down to OS design vs drivers vs hardware (vs how specific hardware influences driver design).

[jeffbee]

M1 machines don’t have bridgeOS at all, right?

[bombcar]

If it can panic apparently they do have it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BridgeOS says it runs the Touch Bar.

[jeffbee]

The M1 lacks the T-series coprocessor altogether and all its functions are inside the main SoC. Whether that means that bridgeOS still runs on non-architectural cores inside the SoC, or its responsibilities have been rolled into macOS, I have no idea. I do know that only my T2-having MacBook suffers from these panics.