Dell D6000 dock resetting on Ubuntu 16.04

[k001]

Originally Posted by Wunsz

That actually gave me an idea <...>
essentially disabling autosuspend on this bus. Will test how it works, but you may want to try it too.

I tried this as well some time ago, and tried again today. Doesn't change anything

The other thing I tried is powering the laptop from the usual power supply (I guess if you plug it it, power over USB-C is disabled, but I can't check that).

Yet another thing to try was not setting external display to be primary (i.e. keep the internal panel, eDP1, as primary).

Unfortunately, none of the above helps, I am still getting disconnects. My gut feeling it is bad hardware (either the Thunderbolt controller, or the displayport hardware in the dock, or maybe even both).

Continuing my research, I found that some people say changing the Wi-Fi board from Atheros or Broadcom to Intel makes the Thunderbolt controller work better. As my Atheros 10k wifi is noticeably bad (bad performance, occasional lockups and kernel oopses) I am going to change it anyway and will report back if it helps (I doubt it, but worth a shot).

The next thing I found is, there's so called "USB-C alternate mode" that (among the other things) enables external displays to be connected through USB-C. It looks like, Dell XPS 13 9360 has two DisplayPorts routed to USB-C. I have yet to figure out what dock is required for that (Dell TB-16 I guess) and whether or not it works for Linux.