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
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