Qubes on Dell Vostro 5581?

[Tomáš Vondra]

Hi,

has anyone tried running Qubes on Dell Vostro 5581 laptop? I've been using a different Dell laptop until now, but I may need a replacement and this seems reasonable.

The specification seems reasonable - i5-8265U does include the VT-x/VT-d features, it should have Intel 9560/9462 wifi, which seems to be supported since kernel 4.14.

Dell does not offer it with Linux, though, so I wonder if there might be some gotcha.

thanks

Tomas

[799]

Hello Tomas,

Tomáš Vondra <tv.f...@gmail.com> schrieb am Sa., 14. Sep. 2019, 12:07:

has anyone tried running Qubes on Dell Vostro 5581 laptop? I've been using a different Dell laptop until now, but I may need a replacement and this seems reasonable.

The Dell Vostro 5581 is not on the Qubes Hardware Compatible List (HCL)

https://www.qubes-os.org/hcl/

But it seems to work with Linux:

https://certification.ubuntu.com/hardware/201808-26383

Therefore I think it _should_ work fine with Qubes.

If you test Qubes on it, please submit a HCL Report, so that users might get an answer to your question.

[799]

[Tomáš Vondra]

On Saturday, September 14, 2019 at 12:57:41 PM UTC+2, 799 wrote:

Hello Tomas,

Tomáš Vondra <tv....@gmail.com> schrieb am Sa., 14. Sep. 2019, 12:07:

has anyone tried running Qubes on Dell Vostro 5581 laptop? I've been using a different Dell laptop until now, but I may need a replacement and this seems reasonable.

The Dell Vostro 5581 is not on the Qubes Hardware Compatible List (HCL)

https://www.qubes-os.org/hcl/

Yes, I know - checking HCL was the first thing I did, sorry for not mentioning that.

 

But it seems to work with Linux:

https://certification.ubuntu.com/hardware/201808-26383

Yup. It seems to be a somewhat different configuration, though. It has an i3 CPU (although from the same generation and with the same feature set) and Atheros wifi (the model I'm looking at seems to use Intel).

 

Therefore I think it _should_ work fine with Qubes.

If you test Qubes on it, please submit a HCL Report, so that users might get an answer to your question.

Sure. Long time ago I've submitted HCL for the laptop I've been using until now, I'll do the same with the new one.

regards

[Tomáš Vondra]

OK,

a quick update from me - I ended up buying this laptop and after much struggling I managed to get Qubes 4.0 running on it. I'm not done with it yet, so I plan to send HCL after (hopefully) solving the remaining issues.

The laptop is fairly "clean" (integrated GPU, etc.) and comes with Ubuntu 16.04. I've upgraded it to Ubuntu 18.04, which also worked fine.

Installing Qubes 4.0 turned out to be pretty difficult, though. The graphical installer was failing to start, and the text mode does not work as it does not allow setting passphrase for disk encryption :-( So to use the text mode I'd have to automate the install using a kickstart script, but I've never done that before so I've tried other things first.

Firstly, I've tried to install current Fedora 30 (regular and then the Xfce spin), because those uses the same installer. And in both cases it works just fine - apparently there's something different in the Qubes installer that makes it fail when starting the graphical environment. A bit of searching lead me to this:

https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/uefi-troubleshooting/

Removing the noexitboot and mapbs options from the xen.cfg did the trick, and after that the installation went mostly smoothly. The touchpad does not work during installation, but I had the same issue on the previous laptop (Dell Precision 5510) so I wasn't particularly worried about it knowing it'll start working after reboot. After that, the installation completed OK, Qubes do boot just fine and the touchpad works.

Almost everything works fine - wifi, sound, ... (haven't tried the rj45, but I don't really care). The one exception is suspend (and poweroff seems a bit wonky too).

1) During suspend, the laptop simply does not wake up. I'm not sure if it "hangs" during the suspend or when waking it up, all I see is a blank screen. IIRC it worked just fine in both Ubuntu and Fedora, although I don't recall if I tried it explicitly (it's be weird if it did not work in ubuntu, which was preinstalled). So my guess is this is due to something being obsolete in dom0, which is still on fc25 in Qubes 4.0. Not sure what to do about this - how/what to investigate :-( I'd appreciate suggestions that to do about this. I'm considering trying to build Qubes 4.1 which I think uses fc29 (at least judging by https://ftp.qubes-os.org/repo/yum/r4.1/current-testing/dom0/) but that seems more like an experiment than a reliable solution.

2) During poweroff/reboot, the laptop prints a lot of messages from device-mapper about ioctl failures, missing reboot-parameter file and then hangs after printing "Restarting system". It might be intermittent, though, or maybe it depends on something else.

regards

[Tomáš Vondra]

Hi,

I'm still struggling with the suspend issue, unfortunately, and I'm kinda stuck so I'd appreciate some ideas what to try.

Everything else seems to be working, but during suspend the laptop gets stuck (black screen, but I can hear the fans still spinning). And then it does not wake up, of couse.

I've tried installing new kernel, as described on https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/software-update-dom0/ and I've even switched to qubes-dom0-current-testing, but neither of that helped :-(

I'm now on kernel 5.2.16, which is newer than what the Fedora/Ubuntu installs used (and suspend works fine with them), so there has to be something else, specific to qubes. But I have no idea what, and I'm not sure how to debug suspend.

Any ideas?

(I've been trying to build Qubes 4.1 as described on https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/qubes-iso-building/, but I keep running into various issues with that too, so I haven't been able to actually test it.)

thanks

[Claudia]

Tomáš Vondra:

I have the exact same suspend/resume problem on an Inspiron 5975, and
another user here recently had the same issue with a different laptop.
So it's pretty common I guess.

Qubes is stuck on F25 right now, and the hardware is too new for the
software. Same as you, I had it working under F30 with an older kernel,
but not under Qubes (F25) with a newer kernel, so it appears that maybe
userland has something to do with it too, not just the kernel.

I haven't been able to find any general remedy for this. I remember
reading somewhere that upgrading dom0 to F30 is more or less impossible.
You might be able to narrow down the userland components and upgrade
them individually, but I have no idea how to go about that. If you find
anything out, please let me know!

There is a pre-release 4.1 iso available.
https://openqa.qubes-os.org/tests/3021 - this is a kind of old link so
newer builds may be available. I could not get it to install on my
machine so I couldn't test suspend on it, but it might work for you.

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[Tomáš Vondra]

On Friday, October 4, 2019 at 4:36:57 PM UTC+2, Claudia wrote:

Tomáš Vondra:
> Hi,
>
> I'm still struggling with the suspend issue, unfortunately, and I'm kinda
> stuck so I'd appreciate some ideas what to try.
>
> Everything else seems to be working, but during suspend the laptop gets
> stuck (black screen, but I can hear the fans still spinning). And then it
> does not wake up, of couse.
>
> I've tried installing new kernel, as described on
> https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/software-update-dom0/ and I've even switched
> to qubes-dom0-current-testing, but neither of that helped :-(
>
> I'm now on kernel 5.2.16, which is newer than what the Fedora/Ubuntu
> installs used (and suspend works fine with them), so there has to be
> something else, specific to qubes. But I have no idea what, and I'm not
> sure how to debug suspend.
>
> Any ideas?
>
> (I've been trying to build Qubes 4.1 as described on
> https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/qubes-iso-building/, but I keep running into
> various issues with that too, so I haven't been able to actually test it.)
>
> thanks
>

I have the exact same suspend/resume problem on an Inspiron 5975, and
another user here recently had the same issue with a different laptop.
So it's pretty common I guess.

OK. Good to know I'm not the only one affected by this.

 

Qubes is stuck on F25 right now, and the hardware is too new for the
software. Same as you, I had it working under F30 with an older kernel,
but not under Qubes (F25) with a newer kernel, so it appears that maybe
userland has something to do with it too, not just the kernel.

Yeah, that's my impression as well.

 

I haven't been able to find any general remedy for this. I remember
reading somewhere that upgrading dom0 to F30 is more or less impossible.
You might be able to narrow down the userland components and upgrade
them individually, but I have no idea how to go about that. If you find
anything out, please let me know!

Not sure, but I suspect running a F25 with some random subset of packages randomly updated to current version is going to be a major pita, or perhaps even impossible (because of dependencies with other packages). I'd much probably prefer running a pre-release version of Qubes 4.1 than such a hybrid.

 

There is a pre-release 4.1 iso available.
https://openqa.qubes-os.org/tests/3021 - this is a kind of old link so
newer builds may be available. I could not get it to install on my
machine so I couldn't test suspend on it, but it might work for you.

Thanks for the link. I gave it a try and there seems to be some improvement compared - the installer now works out of the box, without having to tweak it like I had to with Qubes 4.0. Unfortunately, the suspend/resume issue is still there, although maybe it actually gets to sleep this time (but still does not wake up).

I've tried looking for a newer build (the one you posted is from July, so a couple of months ol), but I haven't found anything. I've been trying to build ISO locally over the past two weeks, but I keep running into issues so I haven't been successful in that.

 

thanks

[Tomáš Vondra]

On Saturday, October 5, 2019 at 7:45:40 PM UTC+2, Tomáš Vondra wrote:

On Friday, October 4, 2019 at 4:36:57 PM UTC+2, Claudia wrote:

...

 

There is a pre-release 4.1 iso available.
https://openqa.qubes-os.org/tests/3021 - this is a kind of old link so
newer builds may be available. I could not get it to install on my
machine so I couldn't test suspend on it, but it might work for you.

Thanks for the link. I gave it a try and there seems to be some improvement compared - the installer now works out of the box, without having to tweak it like I had to with Qubes 4.0. Unfortunately, the suspend/resume issue is still there, although maybe it actually gets to sleep this time (but still does not wake up).

I've tried looking for a newer build (the one you posted is from July, so a couple of months ol), but I haven't found anything. I've been trying to build ISO locally over the past two weeks, but I keep running into issues so I haven't been successful in that.

 

OK, I've noticed there actually is a link to the latest job for that scenario, leading to https://openqa.qubes-os.org/tests/3737 (which is 2019/08/22 instead of 2019/07/01). Unfortunately the suspend behavior is the same as for the older build :-(

regards

 

[Claudia]

Tomáš Vondra:

>
>
> On Saturday, October 5, 2019 at 7:45:40 PM UTC+2, Tomáš Vondra wrote:
>>
>> On Friday, October 4, 2019 at 4:36:57 PM UTC+2, Claudia wrote:
>>
> ...
>>
>>
>>> There is a pre-release 4.1 iso available.
>>> https://openqa.qubes-os.org/tests/3021

>>> <https://www.google.com/url?q=https%3A%2F%2Fopenqa.qubes-os.org%2Ftests%2F3021&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNEtwV-7EB_Hj9-89w3F8kL7XBW3pA>

>>> - this is a kind of old link so
>>> newer builds may be available. I could not get it to install on my
>>> machine so I couldn't test suspend on it, but it might work for you.
>>>
>>>
>> Thanks for the link. I gave it a try and there seems to be some
>> improvement compared - the installer now works out of the box, without
>> having to tweak it like I had to with Qubes 4.0. Unfortunately, the
>> suspend/resume issue is still there, although maybe it actually gets to
>> sleep this time (but still does not wake up).
>>
>> I've tried looking for a newer build (the one you posted is from July, so
>> a couple of months ol), but I haven't found anything. I've been trying to
>> build ISO locally over the past two weeks, but I keep running into issues
>> so I haven't been successful in that.
>>
>>
>
> OK, I've noticed there actually is a link to the latest job for that
> scenario, leading to https://openqa.qubes-os.org/tests/3737 (which is
> 2019/08/22 instead of 2019/07/01). Unfortunately the suspend behavior is
> the same as for the older build :-(
>
> regards
>
>
>

You mean out of the box? Or when dom0 is brought fully up to date? Odds
are slim, but updating might fix the problem. Also enabling
testing/unstable repos might help.

As far as building your own iso, I'm afraid I don't know anything about
that, but there are plenty of people on this list who could help if you
start a thread about the specific problems you're having.

In general, debugging suspend/resume is quite difficult unless you're a
kernel developer with a serial console. However there are a couple of
things you can do that might get you a step further.

First, it's helpful to know if the machine is actually going into
suspend. Open a few terminals and run `sha256sum /dev/urandom` and wait
for the fans to start running. If you hear them stop, you know it
suspended. If, on resume, you hear them start up again, then it could be
that the machine is partially resuming but just the screen is not coming
back on (possibly indicative of a GPU or WiFi driver problem). Playing a
repeating sound probably has the same effect. You can also hit caps lock
and num lock after resume and see if the lights change.

Try shutting down all VMs before suspending. I think the command is
`qvm-shutdown --all --force --wait` or something like that. Make sure
they're all stopped (e.g., `qvm-ls`). This can tell you if something
with PCI passthru is causing a problem, such as (most likely) the NetVM
or UsbVM (wifi card, wifi driver, usb controller).

Another idea, try disabling VT-x and VT-d in BIOS, then boot Qubes and
try suspend. This might tell you if it's a Xen problem, or a firmware
bug related to VT-x, for example.

If the option is present, try disabling the onboard WiFi card in BIOS.
It's worth trying this for any other hardware too (dGPU, etc).

Try upgrading your machine's firmware. On dell you can do this via
fwupd, Freedos, or using the boot-menu option to upgrade from USB drive.
On my Dell, option 3 was simply broken, so I had to do it from Freedos.

Try installing Fedora with Xen (the basis of Qubes) and see if it
resumes from there.

There are also tons of techniques for debugging suspend on generic
Linux. You can play with acpi_osi=, mem_sleep_default=, `dmesg >
before.txt ; pm-suspend ; dmesg > after.txt`, the list goes on and on.
Here's a nice article to get you started:
https://01.org/blogs/rzhang/2015/best-practice-debug-linux-suspend/hibernate-issues

If you want to read my (thus-far unresolved) experience with suspend in
painstaking detail, check out the rest of the thread starting with this
message:
https://www.mail-archive.com/qubes...@googlegroups.com/msg29755.html

That's all I can think of at the moment, but hopefully enough to get you
started.