boltd running on a system with no thunderbolt devices

[Steve Langasek]

I notice on my Cosmic system that boltd is running.

This system has no thunderbolt devices, so having this daemon running is a waste of resources.

Please fix this package to only start if devices are present, or if it must be started, to shut down on idle if no devices are discovered.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

That's known upstream and reported as https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/bolt/bolt/issues/92

They agree it would be nice so that might happen at some point but it requires to resolve some questions about interactions with the desktop components, etc so not trivial.

[Christian Kellner (gicmo)]

I actually think that this might have been fixed. I suspect the main reason that bolt was started in the first place was fwupd (the firmware update daemon) starting it to force power the thunderbolt controller. It does so even if there is no controller to force power in the first place.
A small fix (https://github.com/fwupd/fwupd/commit/7e5c7b269a3b9182db58a201c24835177107ad41) to the fwupd daemon should prevent it from poking bolt if there is no hope of boltd succeeding in force powering the daemon. Thus on a system without any thunderbolt controller boltd should not be started anymore.

NB: The linked bug is to auto idle-quit the daemon if it is started but no controller found, while the fix should prevent the daemon to even be started.

[Mario Limonciello (superm1)]

That fix for fwupd to not use boltd on such systems is landed in fwupd 1.3.3 which is currently in focal-proposed.

[Mario Limonciello (superm1)]

1.3.3-3 promoted to focal release pocket today fixes this, marking fix released.