Qubes 3.2 won't boot with newer kernels on Lenovo T450

[koto...@gmail.com]

Hey guys,

I had been running Qubes 3.1 without any issues on my Lenovo T450, since the support for 3.1 is over I upgraded to 3.2. At first it worked fine but it stopped booting with newer kernels. It goes on infinite booting cycle.

I looked through Qubes's website Lenovo Troubleshooting pages and the following group thread https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/qubes-users/UXP8RJffpsY, but was unable to resolve my issue with the information found there.

I currently have XEN 4.6.5 and the following kernels:
4.4.62-12 - goes to infinite boot
4.4.38-11 - same
4.1.24-10 - boots fine

I tried passing noreboot=true to XEN and modeset=0 to Linux as well as console=hvc0 and earlyprintk=0 as suggested here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/qubes-users/UXP8RJffpsY, with no luck (except it does not reboot of course just freezes with the blank screen).

Could you guys point me in the right direction as to how do I troubleshoot this issue. E.g. outputs something to the console.

Thanks!

[Ed Welch]

I just purchased a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon 4th Gen and have been installing qubes on it over the past few days.  I had the same troubles you are seeing with your T450.

Things were fine with the 3.2 installer and the 4.4.14-11 kernel, but as soon as I updated dom0 which gave me a newer kernel (I forgot which, but probably was 4.4.62-12), the system would no longer reliably boot.  It appears it would be trying to show me the screen where it would be prompting me for my LUKS password but would freeze at a black screen.  I would have to hold the power button down and boot again.

The interesting thing was that maybe 1 out of 20 or 30 tries it would actually work, making it kind of feel like a timing or race condition of some kind.

I changed the kernel params, removing "quiet" and adding "text" to try and get some idea what was happening, however, the info moved on the screen so fast and the screen totally blanked without me being able to see anything at all about what was happening.  I even tried recording it with my phone camera and had no luck.

The X1 Carbon does not have a serial port so I can't do any kind of console logging, and I'm quite sure the issue is happening just before or right around when the usb system is initialized so I can't really do any usb serial logging either.

I ran out of ideas trying to troubleshoot the issue and decided to try another tack.

I booted with the 4.4.14-11 kernel and ran

sudo qubes-dom0-update --enablerepo=qubes-dom0-unstable

This installed a much newer kernel 4.8.12-12, and all my boot troubles have since gone away.  So it seems whatever the issue is with the newer 4.4 kernels it was fixed in newer versions

So maybe you will have luck on your T450 with the 4.8 kernel from unstable.

Good Luck!

Ed

[migue...@gmail.com]

Hi,

On Wednesday, May 10, 2017 at 2:43:15 PM UTC+10, koto...@gmail.com wrote:

> I currently have XEN 4.6.5 and the following kernels:
> 4.4.62-12 - goes to infinite boot
> 4.4.38-11 - same
> 4.1.24-10 - boots fine

I had the same problem on my T450S. I seem to have solved it by changing the Graphics in BIOS from 256M to 512M. After that the 4.4+ kernels seem to boot fine.

Cheers
Mig

[Myron Weber]

On Wednesday, May 10, 2017 at 5:46:31 AM UTC-7, migue...@gmail.com wrote:
> I had the same problem on my T450S. I seem to have solved it by changing the Graphics in BIOS from 256M to 512M. After that the 4.4+ kernels seem to boot fine.

Exactly! I had the same experience on my T460.

[koto...@gmail.com]

It worked! Thanks guys!