Skylake on R3.1-rc1

[Eric Shelton]

Marek,

Just a heads up that I think I sorted out what needs to happen for Skylake to work with Qubes:

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/qubes-users/UXP8RJffpsY/k15G1txyAgAJ

Summary: (1) a linux command line option is required, and (2) i915 requires firmware blobs for Skylake, which need to be included in initramfs.

Also, although not necessary to get things running, attached is a recent patch from xen-devel to get Xen's mwait-idle working for Skylake, in case you want to make use of it.

Best,
Eric

[Outback Dingo]

Just so everyone is aware, ive got a skylake laptop 264 Gb, and 4K Video with Fedora 23 and XEN 4.5.1 running on it fine, under kde plasma 5/xmonad desktop

I guess qubes itself could bump up a bit even, my audio and video work great, and im using the nouveau driver under XEN on a 4k laptop screen 

no problems, also a display port to a 34" LG UWQHD Screen, just have to plug the external monitor in after the system boots or SDDM freaks out.

It would be great to get a "more updated" version of Qubes on it though.

 

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "qubes-devel" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to qubes-devel...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to qubes...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/qubes-devel/a3546550-5a46-479c-9f27-e96da430bf16%40googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Outback Dingo]

On Wed, Dec 2, 2015 at 7:50 AM, Outback Dingo <outbac...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Dec 2, 2015 at 5:09 AM, Eric Shelton <knock...@gmail.com> wrote:

Marek,

Just a heads up that I think I sorted out what needs to happen for Skylake to work with Qubes:

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/qubes-users/UXP8RJffpsY/k15G1txyAgAJ

Summary: (1) a linux command line option is required, and (2) i915 requires firmware blobs for Skylake, which need to be included in initramfs.

Also, although not necessary to get things running, attached is a recent patch from xen-devel to get Xen's mwait-idle working for Skylake, in case you want to make use of it.

Best,
Eric

Just so everyone is aware, ive got a skylake laptop 264 Gb, and 4K Video with Fedora 23 and XEN 4.5.1 running on it fine, under kde plasma 5/xmonad desktop

Errr correction thats 64Gb memory

[Eric Shelton]

On Tuesday, December 1, 2015 at 3:50:41 PM UTC-5, Outback Dingo wrote:

On Wed, Dec 2, 2015 at 5:09 AM, Eric Shelton <knock...@gmail.com> wrote:

Marek,

Just a heads up that I think I sorted out what needs to happen for Skylake to work with Qubes:

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/qubes-users/UXP8RJffpsY/k15G1txyAgAJ

Summary: (1) a linux command line option is required, and (2) i915 requires firmware blobs for Skylake, which need to be included in initramfs.

Also, although not necessary to get things running, attached is a recent patch from xen-devel to get Xen's mwait-idle working for Skylake, in case you want to make use of it.

Best,
Eric

Just so everyone is aware, ive got a skylake laptop 264 Gb, and 4K Video with Fedora 23 and XEN 4.5.1 running on it fine, under kde plasma 5/xmonad desktop

I guess qubes itself could bump up a bit even, my audio and video work great, and im using the nouveau driver under XEN on a 4k laptop screen 

no problems, also a display port to a 34" LG UWQHD Screen, just have to plug the external monitor in after the system boots or SDDM freaks out.

It would be great to get a "more updated" version of Qubes on it though.

 

Most of the headache with running Skylake has been with the integrated GPU.  In your case, since you are running nouveau, I would say that is not a problem.  If you apply the xsave patch to Xen 4.4.3, or add 'xsave=0' to the Xen command line in grub.cfg, I see no reason why you should not be able to run Qubes R3.0 (except that you may have trouble getting the 3.0 installer to run, because 'xsave=0' is not getting sent to Xen - one way around this is to do the initial install on a non-Skylake machine).  I would expect no problems for you on the upcoming R3.1-rc1, whether or not Marek incorporates the above suggestions, since you do not need the integrated GPU to work on your laptop.

Eric 

[Marek Marczykowski-Górecki]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

You can set that to installer too - just after xen.gz in that long
command line of isolinux (pres tab to get there).

> - one way
> around this is to do the initial install on a non-Skylake machine). I
> would expect no problems for you on the upcoming R3.1-rc1, whether or not
> Marek incorporates the above suggestions, since you do not need the
> integrated GPU to work on your laptop.

I'm not following - that command line parameter is still needed in xen
4.6?

- --
Best Regards,
Marek Marczykowski-Górecki
Invisible Things Lab
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v2

iQEcBAEBCAAGBQJWXhAdAAoJENuP0xzK19cs364H/2HeH7/X8Bf2FYp2d3MkGdHv
p15O189vOrQCd3VEqdsT1LKvBImuhrFms2Df/YhbN3qaGyrDp/QjpuSSPdzPsiJD
dcNf7DRTwfiLRroumdp1nbCS17vSCt+WVP6uYu8Yun+TpjyazYC7B0tWL0qUCOFQ
5wCBs85Kd076np2s5nlj8E8Jz6hqKzjPhs1MbdehhfEklfRD2ONbh2nLEqO5QNV4
4wNQBAw4TXTP8AjLILQoLz0v9gLm99glqwc9Ix8GFKmNlumP5W1A64Ut2k5SvERx
zQ+5T70kR/96FssubRmDjPGRW2NOl42kAJkQ74zjvUtGv+eUi4OQTGdaVSrZGoI=
=2iCi
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

[Eric Shelton]

The 'i915.preliminary_hw_support=1' option is for the Linux kernel, and is required unless you are running 4.3 (which made Skylake support no longer preliminary).

The 'xsave=0' option is for Xen, and is no longer needed in 4.6, or is no longer needed if you apply the patch against 4.4.3 I provided a few days ago.

Eric 

[Eric Shelton]

After doing a fresh install of Qubes 3.2 on a Skylake system, I noticed that 'xl dmesg' was reporting "mwait-idle: does not run on family 6 model 94".  As I mentioned above, a patch is available to address this.  Since then, the above patch was committed to xen.git (4c6cd64519f9bc270a7278128c94e4b66e3d2077).

There are also commits for mwait-idle updates to Kaby Lake (1008063e1cd15257875b9db18eede710077adea5) and Skylake Xeon (9062fd6bfa5211398582780d89d655cff9f9ed8c).

While you are at it, you might want to pull in a couple of subsequent Skylake-related commits: 5a211704e8813c4890c8ce8dc4189d1dfb35ecd0 ("mwait-idle: prevent SKL-H boot failure when C8+C9+C10 enabled") and 372ad59dd0e7a3df0bd46ec3c8b934d739eb07b5 ("mwait-idle: add a missing __init annotation").

There is another Skylake-related commit unrelated to mwait-idle (c52319642bb9069436d4aec75361049f5fac63ed), but I don't know if this is actually likely to cause any issues.

Eric

[Marek Marczykowski-Górecki]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

On Fri, Oct 14, 2016 at 09:37:55AM -0700, Eric Shelton wrote:
> On Tuesday, December 1, 2015 at 1:09:06 PM UTC-5, Eric Shelton wrote:
> >
> > Marek,
> >
> > Just a heads up that I think I sorted out what needs to happen for Skylake
> > to work with Qubes:
> >
> > https://groups.google.com/d/msg/qubes-users/UXP8RJffpsY/k15G1txyAgAJ
> >
> > Summary: (1) a linux command line option is required, and (2) i915
> > requires firmware blobs for Skylake, which need to be included in initramfs.
> >
> > Also, although not necessary to get things running, attached is a recent
> > patch from xen-devel to get Xen's mwait-idle working for Skylake, in case
> > you want to make use of it.
> >
> > Best,
> > Eric
> >
> >
> After doing a fresh install of Qubes 3.2 on a Skylake system, I noticed
> that 'xl dmesg' was reporting "mwait-idle: does not run on family 6 model
> 94". As I mentioned above, a patch is available to address this. Since
> then, the above patch was committed to xen.git
> (4c6cd64519f9bc270a7278128c94e4b66e3d2077).
>
> There are also commits for mwait-idle updates to Kaby Lake
> (1008063e1cd15257875b9db18eede710077adea5) and Skylake Xeon
> (9062fd6bfa5211398582780d89d655cff9f9ed8c).

Thanks!

> While you are at it, you might want to pull in a couple of subsequent
> Skylake-related commits: 5a211704e8813c4890c8ce8dc4189d1dfb35ecd0
> ("mwait-idle: prevent SKL-H boot failure when C8+C9+C10 enabled")

Backporting this one to Xen 4.6 is non-trivial, as
xen/include/public/arch-x86/cpufeatureset.h isn't there. And to make
things harder, "CPUID level 0x00000007:0.ebx" values are moved to word 5
from word 7 in the commit introducing cpufeatureset.h, without any
explanation. In fact I'm not sure if that isn't a bug.

So, I'll leave it out, as there is a workaround: either specify
max_cstate=7, or enable SGX in BIOS.

Hmm, but actually this may make things worse: instead of unsupported
mwait-idle, backporting only first patches may result in unbootable
system (unless mentioned workaround will be applied). So, maybe better
do not apply any of those?

> and 372ad59dd0e7a3df0bd46ec3c8b934d739eb07b5 ("mwait-idle: add a missing
> __init annotation").

And this one is a fix for 5a211704e8813c4890c8ce8dc4189d1dfb35ecd0.

> There is another Skylake-related commit unrelated to mwait-idle
> (c52319642bb9069436d4aec75361049f5fac63ed), but I don't know if this is
> actually likely to cause any issues.

This also is tricky to backport to 4.6.

- --
Best Regards,
Marek Marczykowski-Górecki
Invisible Things Lab
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v2

iQEcBAEBCAAGBQJYAaB3AAoJENuP0xzK19csYwQH/RN7ykuJjyZeR3Gv5sIZIevT
2shiGEbexdah1Fbs0Ikr2KDpQgXrTTxNScGW53cu5InvOafqWZRZOZKHEMXBf+Pu
JqNc4elQfyVrkxdGPeaND4oueeebrQg/uY8yAFkGo2jJ5oXuDeUg+b4dc0a4S0BR
3vE+6eBj3niOnwg5GiLRPqQvogz+ciiE1q5FUp19VGTtb4TPfZ5pvQ0t1tMDuuEI
4YMkZ3XdgTxNJKw3xjENturBwqqjkToxyJLmDnrtG36GXCUa+Exc3RwrXGsOwP0b
PB3OqeoS+hsvR+nzpg64+BK949+PGvRD3UDjjpQhzg0cLh2Pu+91E5g42IRmeis=
=2nDX
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----