Thunderbolt Bridge for Faster Networking
For context, I have an absurdly fast internet connection, much faster than any wifi standard. When playing around with open source LLMs via ollama, the downloads of those models are huge but also hosted on very fast servers. Downloading on my desktop, which is a Mac Studio connected via 10Gb ethernet was a breeze with 900 MB/s download speeds. Doing the same over wifi would be at least 10x slower at my home (no wifi 7 devices there yet). Installing the models on my laptop therefore would be way more efficient with wired Ethernet connection. One solution could be to buy a USB-C to 10G Ethernet adapter and plug that into the 10G switch in my office. Or simply connect the two computers via Thunderbolt cable directly. By default macOS offers a “Thunderbolt bridge” to network all macs connected via thunderbolt ports. However by default, the Ethernet port of the Mac Studio is not included in that bridge.
To add it:
- Go to System Settings -> Network
- There click on the three-dot “action popup” menu and choose Manage Virtual Interfaces
- In there should be the Thunderbolt bridge already, click on the pen to edit it and add the Ethernet device to it.
- If not you can add a new bridge and add the thunderbolt plus Ethernet ports to it.
Another solution is to share the internet connection of your computer via the Thunderbolt bridge, but that is less performant and introducing an unneeded NAT on the networking path. This would allow you to download stuff from the internet, but makes it hard to access local file-servers for example.
I now run the most expensive network switch ever ;)