a cumulative post about some issues i'm having with my qubes installation (looking forward for help)

[Francesco Rmp]

Hello,
since i didn't want to flood the group with a bunch of problems i'm having, i thought it was quite a good idea to collect them in a single post, I hope someone can help me out with either any of these.

a short background:
everything started when i've upgraded my VGA from an old GTX560 to a new GTX1060, this is when i discovered that qubes, because of nouveau not really at a bleeding edge version isn't compatible with the said video card, at a point that i can't see anything on screen.
I've solved this by blacklisting the driver and eventually i managed to get the system to boot into X, but now i have the following problems:

1) the only supported resolution appears to be 1024x768@75hz, and this is kinda frustrating considering i have a full HD display, i'd like to get back to 1920x1080@120Hz, since this resolution is supported by my display.

2) collaterally, by trying to fix the video issue, i've discovered that the EFI partition (i have qubes running from an external USB3 HD) boots stright into the OS, and doesn't chainload to GRUB, I have absolutely no idea why, since this is something that the installer took care of on its own, but this is becoming very limiting, because every update in the qubes dom0, especially when related with a new kernel, requires quite a bit of extra work:
- mounting the EFI system partition
- fix the parameters manually in the CFG
can anyone help me out in setting things up properly so that i have a proper grub configuration?

3) the last thing: for some odd reasons i'm stuck on kernel 4.4.14 because of performance reasons, despite not changing ANYTHING except from the kernel version, when running from 4.4.55, X is extremely slow and choppy, mouse lags, and to a point that the system is absolutely unusable. any idea on what this can be caused by?

Since this is quite an active development community i'm fairly confident that across the users and/or devs, someone will be able to help me out with my issues, because I'm really enthusiast about this OS, and looking forward to use it more, despite the transition is quite complex as of now.

Thanks in advance

[cooloutac]

I would check to see what the latest kernel available in the testing repo is.

[cooloutac]

linux always lags a few years behind hardware support. looking at this https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1411830 makes me think 1060 not gonna work with nouveau on any kernel right now.

another solution would be to try and install the proprietary nvidia driver from rpm fusion in dom0 but prop drivers are considered insecure. Not sure it will even work but maybe worth a shot.

[Chris Laprise]

On 04/24/2017 12:20 PM, cooloutac wrote:
> linux always lags a few years behind hardware support. looking at this https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1411830 makes me think 1060 not gonna work with nouveau on any kernel right now.
>
> another solution would be to try and install the proprietary nvidia driver from rpm fusion in dom0 but prop drivers are considered insecure. Not sure it will even work but maybe worth a shot.

Somewhere in this thread belongs a diatribe against Nvidia being
FOSS-hostile. But I'll let you all search Youtube for "Torvalds nvidia"
to see -- graphically -- what I mean. ;)

--

Chris Laprise, tas...@openmailbox.org
https://twitter.com/ttaskett
PGP: BEE2 20C5 356E 764A 73EB 4AB3 1DC4 D106 F07F 1886

[Francesco Rmp]

let's say that, for now i'd be happy enaugh if i could increase the screen resolution to my native monitor one, but i don't know if i have to add something in the xorg configuration, since even trying to force the resolution from there doesn't seem to work.

[cooloutac]

lmao just watched it. Personally I never had any problems with nvidia on linux, with either open source or prop drivers. I've always prefered it over ati. But then again I would never buy bleeding edge hardware to run linux.

[Francesco Rmp]

Indeedbleeding edge VGAs are not really the best idea for a linux OS in general, but with other "mainstream" distributions, i don't have these problems, mainly because they are more frequently updated then qubes.

I'm not blaming qubes for being conservative, don't misunderstand me, a system focusing primarly on security for the end user needs to be throughly tested and you can't simply pick up packages and import them into the repo without previously making sure that they don't breake the security model in any possible way.. also XEN is a b*** when it comes to hardware compatibility.. so.. yeah i just hope i'll find a way to solve my problem, as said, i'm not looking for high end 3d graphics in qubes at all, but at least an even non accelerated decent resolution.. I'd love to gain that :)

[cooloutac]

you would have same issue on mainstream linux apparently man. Nouveau is about the kernel version you are using. Apparently even 4.9 might still not work correctly for you even on a baremetal fedora system with that card, as seen by the amount of people complaining on fedora forum threads. Most people buy cards like that for gpu intensive processing like graphics design and gaming and use the nvidia proprietary drivers. There seems to be no choice, I guess if you want to use open source drivers, your nvidia card has to be at least over two years old to ensure compatibility.

[Francesco Rmp]

It'd be fine to install the nvidia proprietary drivers in dom0, but looking at the documentation on the qubes project site, the guidelines are a bit outdated and i cant seem to be able to follow the procedure, do you know any other more updated tutorial that would work on an updated qubes installation?

what version of fedora is it based on, now?

[cooloutac]

I believe fedora 23.