Chris Laprise:
On 7/22/19 11:38 AM, Claudia wrote:
So I finally got around to doing this.
Qubes works and all the basic features are supported, VT-x VT-d, and
so on, as far as I can tell.
One major issue, hardware/firmware-wise:
1) It doesn't come back from suspend. The fan stops, but there are no
blinking lights (actually, no lights besides AC and caps lock), and
nothing I do wakes it. I have to long-press the power button, then
press again to turn on the machine. It's probably an ACPI issue,
probably not a graphics driver issue as there's no dGPU. I played
around with acpi_osi= and some basic troubleshooting but the odds of
me being able to fix it are slim to none.
This is good to hear!
Minor issues:
2) Buggy BIOS / ACPI impl. Dom0 kernel dmesg complains about
"[Firmware bug]" and ACPI issues. Though no noticeable problems except
suspend. The firmware's OS-less update-from-USB-drive feature seems
broken, I tried several times. Still might be able to update from
fwupd, though. No UI for managing secure boot keys, etc., it seems to
only have the bare minimum options.
So, it appears you were totally right about consumer-grade laptops and
buggy firmware. But suspend/resume is problematic even among
high-end/business-class laptops, too, isn't it? It's just something
Linux has never been good at.
TBH, I haven't had long-term problems with suspend on Thinkpads _except_
when anti-evil-maid is enabled; that combo hasn't worked for about 2 years.
My experience is that consumer BIOS will result in poor suspend
compatibility.
Not what I wanted to hear of course, but it does seem that way. I can't
say you didn't warn me. But that's the *only* firmware/hardware issue
I've run into so far. I feel like I'm so close!
3) USB qube isn't working. I installed with USB qube, and the
microphone shows up fine. But flash drives and the card reader don't
show up. When I plug in a USB drive, its LED blinks on for a fraction
of a second, then turns off (on other machines it stays on). No sign
of it in lsusb or lsblk in either sys-usb or dom0.
However, when I remove the qubes.rd.hide_all_usb kernel flag, it works
normally, so I think this is just a software issue.
This could have to do with how the USB controllers respond to the steps
involved in placing it under IOMMU passthrough. I think without
hide_all_usb set, they get reset twice (once in dom0 and once in sys-usb)?
As long as it's not strictly firmware/hardware-related, I'll worry about
it later and start another thread for it. If I have to get rid of the
USB qube or something it's not that big of a deal.
4) Screen power management (turn off display) doesn't work, although I
had the same problem with a machine where suspend does work, and I
think I narrowed it down to a fedora/X11 issue. The display does turn
off when the lid is closed and lid-switch is set to "do nothing," though.
I usually have to switch to KDE with sddm to get this working.
I think I had it working temporarily on my current machine by directly
using X11 commands, it was just XFCE not using them correctly or
something. It must happen to a lot of people, if you ran into it as
well. That's something I can worry about later too. I'll keep sddm in
mind and see if that fixes it.
5) ...plus a few other minor issues probably not hardware related.
Right now I'm trying to decide if I can live without suspend. But,
this is such a common problem that I'm afraid the next one I trade it
in for would have the same problem, and the next one after that. Then
I spent twice the money and got nowhere. This issue is all-too-common
on laptops running Linux. It could be fixed (or broken) on any machine
at any time in a random kernel update, too, but who knows.
This is especially a problem because Xen doesn't support hibernation
at all (not to mention whether it would actually work), and Qubes
doesn't support Xen's "save VM state" feature, either of which I could
live with instead. So my only choices are "on" and "off."
This is an excellent point, and I think there is a Qubes issue about VM
hibernation...
#2414, which hasn't had any activity in two years.
Besides suspend being broken, I actually really like it, and you can't
go wrong for the price.
I think I'm going to try installing Ubuntu and testing suspend from
there, and also trying to update the firmware from fwupd, but I'm not
holding my breath.
That's what I would also try first. Qubes 2.0 used to make my ethernet
NIC go dead, but booting temporarily with an Ubuntu live cd would get it
working again and I could use it in Qubes after that until I did a
Qubes-to-Qubes reboot. Problem stopped around Qubes 4.0. :)
So, any advice on troubleshooting suspend... or advice on what to do
next, I guess... would be appreciated. Ugh, this is totally frustrating.
You should try these:
* Find which wifi modules are being used in sys-net (i.e. do "sudo
lsmod") then add them to /rw/config/suspend-module-blacklist. I find
this is usually required to get suspend working right. For an Intel wifi
card, you would add both 'iwldvm' and 'iwlwifi' in that order.
I didn't think of wifi modules preventing suspend. I'll definitely give
it a try, but I'm not sure it could cause the kind of problem I'm
having. It doesn't seem like it's even trying to wake up when I press a
key or the power button. It just stays sleeping. The only observable
difference between sleep and off is that in sleep pressing the power
button doesn't turn the machine on until I power cycle. Also, I tried
enabling "USB Wake Support" in BIOS, but it didn't seem to make a
difference.
* Upgrade the dom0 and vm kernels to 4.19 or later. The 4.19 versions
from qubes*testing have been very stable for me. OTOH, there are also
5.x versions available.
I did `qubes-dom0-upgrade --enablerepo=qubes-dom0-unstable kernel` and I
still couldn't get a newer kernel. 4.14.199-2 popped up and it said
"nothing to do." What am I doing wrong?
It doesn't seem like VM kernels would make a difference with suspend,
but I can try upgrading them anyways.
Thanks again
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