HCL - Clevo N850

[Brunoais]

Problems and some background

Booting:

Booting only worked with

1. UFI turned off.
2. nuveau blacklisted (blacklist.drivers=nouveau)

With UFI turned on, it was always unable to find Qubes on my flashdrive.
With nuveau not blacklisted, Xorg was always unable to start (I don't know how to get the logs for here).

For about 1/10th of the times (I've been manually counting 20) for the past weeks, boot fails. It asks for the decryption passphrase and it fails to decrypt the partition.

Installation:

Background: I have an SSD and an HDD. I tried splitting OS data (larger information which changes less often) into the SSD and the regular data (smaller data that changes much more often) into the HDD.
This included storing "/boot" and "/" into the SSD and "/home" and "/swap" to the HDD.
Problem: Unfortunately, no matter the way I tried to configure (unless if placing all into the SSD), It only boots from the HDD and can't boot from the SSD, for some reason.

Setup:

Worked without issues.

Qubes features:

Sleep does not restore reliably: Every time I put the PC to sleep, it is a gamble of whether or not it will come back.... Even though the odds have been more turned to "it will come back". When it doesn't turn back, it exits from sleep, turns on the screen but nothing ever appears on screen. Instead, XScreenSaver password prompt should appear, instead.

Dom0 has a task manager... Which unfortunately, doesn't tell me how much %CPU each machine is working. Knowing about hypervisors, I suspect that is caused by how a hypervisor itself works, where the host can't know how it is using the hardware unless it is running in HVM mode (in Xen's case)

Unofficially supported features:

GPU (GTX1050TiM) passthrough: Unfortunately, I was completely unable to setup a passthrough for this GPU. I've tried many other success stories. According to my research, I'd need nouveau working on DOM0 and qubes allowing OpenGL (or equivalent) because the contents of the qube would be shown on a window instead of a different screen and then I'd need to get bumblebee (or equivalent) to work on DOM0. (E.g. guide: https://gist.github.com/Misairu-G/616f7b2756c488148b7309addc940b28)

My main objective for this was 3D rendering (and other usages for the CUDA cores, including, for programming use) and for gaming.

Unless someone is able to help me handing the only problem which prevents me from using Qubes.

Results

Everything worked as the manual described and I didn't have any surprises with actions and features on this platform.

Aftermath

Since the beginning of last year I've been wanting to use qubes. It has so so many features which makes having a very secure system much easier than most other OS. Not only that, it also makes privacy and anonymity (when chosen to) a much easier and straightforward job to implement. Even then backing up any of the qubes is a job almost without hassle. In nearly all I did, qubes was doing a great job behind the scenes to keep me informed about nearly all that was being done.

[awokd]

On Tue, May 1, 2018 3:14 pm, Brunoais wrote:

>
> GPU (GTX1050TiM) passthrough: Unfortunately, I was completely unable to
> setup a passthrough for this GPU. I've tried many other success stories.
> According to my research, I'd need nouveau working on DOM0 and qubes
> allowing OpenGL (or equivalent) because the contents of the qube would be
> shown on a window instead of a different screen and then I'd need to get
> bumblebee (or equivalent) to work on DOM0. (E.g. guide:
> https://gist.github.com/Misairu-G/616f7b2756c488148b7309addc940b28)

That's an interesting link. Looks like he is using QEMU and passing
through the discrete GPU to his VM, then getting output back over
RDP/RemoteFX. You should be able to pass the GPU through to a Qube by
attaching it, but I'm not sure anyone has been able to get it to work like
you describe.

[bruno ais]

No matter what I try, I keep getting crashes from the OS in the VM when I do a GPU passthrough. I'm still investigating if I'm missing something by using more permissive OSs (ubuntu MATE, for now).
I did notice that, with ubuntu, I'd have to set "nomodeset" for the booting parameters, otherwise, it would exponentially get slower up to a complete unresponsiveness.