Dear Qubes users, I am having trouble installing Qubes OS on my Thinkpad T420, after installing Coreboot on it. Here is what I have to report.
The device is as follows, a Thinkpad T420 with an i7-2720QM. It has the discrete Nvidia graphics, 16G of RAM, and an SSD. Coreboot was configured as follows: SeaBIOS as primary payload, native graphics initialization, microcode updates included, resulting image "de-blobbed" with me_cleaner, memtest86+ as secondary payload. Coreboot boots fine into SeaBIOS and can see all devices. I shorted WP/GND on the flash chip to prevent arbitrary rewrites by the operating system. I had already installed Qubes on the device when it was running the proprietary BIOS. This worked fine, without any trouble. Originally, the device had an i7-2670QM, but I acquired an i7-2720QM since the 2670 did not have the IO/MMU feature. The device can boot the installer without any problems (other than odd messages about rendering errors, but these are not alarming). The device can also boot the original installation of Qubes from when it was running the proprietary BIOS. The behavior of trying to boot a stock Qubes install that was installed using the installer booted by Coreboot, is that selecting the SSD to boot from just seems to result in hanging. It should boot after 1 minute or so, (or considerably less considering this is an SSD) but it hangs for considerably longer than that, whereafter I turned off the computer to save power. Theory 1: The SSD is the problem. To test this, I decided to install a different OS on the SSD, in this case, Debian 8. This worked flawlessly. This suggests that there is no flaw with the SSD. I actually (regrettably) attempted to install Qubes over the original installation of Qubes, to test if Coreboot was not playing well with the SSD. The same behavior occurred. Theory 2: Coreboot, or SeaBIOS, is the problem. This does not make sense either, since I was able to boot the original Qubes installation, the Qubes installer, as well as install Debian on the SSD. Theory 3: The new processor is the problem. The other hardware I introduced into the system does not seem to be the issue, since I was able to boot Debian, the Qubes installer, and the original install of Qubes without issue. Concerning the new processor, I was able to get Coreboot to work flawlessly with it, so I suspect this is not interfering with the software. Theory 4: Qubes installer is not playing well with Coreboot somehow. This seems to be the problem, since I can boot the other Qubes install, and Debian installs fine on this. Firstly, I suspected that the automatic partition might be somehow iffy, e.g. malformed boot partition. I am not sure what would cause this. So I attempted to install with the simplest setup, a 500M partition for /boot, and then filled the rest of the disk with an encrypted / partition. Perhaps there is a better way to partition, but I am unfamiliar with Anaconda's partitioning interface. The way that volume groups are handled was particularly confusing. Regardless, this was not successful at all. Another prime suspect is graphics not working for some reason - but I am quite unsure about this also, since the Qubes installer seems to work flawlessly in terms of booting up and allowing interaction - I would assume that the Qubes installer is very similar to regular Qubes in how it boots up and handles graphics, so I remain skeptical of this being the issue. Furthermore, reading other threads concerning Coreboot and Qubes, I get the impression that many fellow Coreboot users did not attempt to install Qubes from a system already running Coreboot, and instead used the previous installation. Perhaps there is an issue in the Qubes installer that has remained uncovered? Alternatively, I may be missing something very crucial. If so, please feel free to berate me! Thank you in advance, D -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "qubes-users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to qubes-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to qubes-users@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/qubes-users/b4a965cc-e240-3934-52da-21cb6b444080%40posteo.net. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
