Beta 1 and ATI graphics

[Daniel Selifonov]

First of all, congratulations on the release of Qubes Beta 1. I've been watching this project with great interest since your announcement last year, and had been playing with Alpha 3 since November.

I just finished installing Beta 1 on my laptop. Everything feels considerably more polished, and so far it hasn't randomly hard-locked like Alpha 3 was prone to do.

My hardware specifications are as follows:
IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad T60 (late-2006):
Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 (Merom, 2.00 Ghz)
Intel 945GM Chipset
4 GB of RAM (unfortunately, of which only 3 GB is addressable due to the limitations of the chipset)
ATI Mobility Radeon X1400

This system supports VT-x, but no VT-d, so I realize that I don't get the DMA attack protection benefits of a netvm.

I used the disk encryption option to encrypt the root partition.

Installation was pretty straightforward, however I noticed that (unlike in Alpha 3) I was not getting hardware acceleration in dom0, and could not use OpenGL for compositing. Inspection of X and the package showed the open source Radeon drivers were properly installed. Running glxinfo showed "direct rendering: yes", but the OpenGL vendor was the Mesa software renderer. Eventually I traced this to the extremely early initialization of hardware acceleration via kernel mode setting during boot up for the pretty Plymouth startup screens. This initialization requires loading an external firmware image into the video hardware. These images were present under /lib/firmware/2.6.34.1-14.xenlinux.qubes.x86_64/radeon, but these files are not present so early in the boot process (i.e. before decryption password is entered by the user).

To get hardware acceleration working on my Radeon, I modified my initramfs image to include the Radeon firmware files. These are the steps that I took (in dom0):
$ sudo bash
# mkdir /tmp/initramfs
# cd /tmp/initramfs
# zcat /boot/initramfs-2.6.34.1-14.xenlinux.qubes.x86_64.img | cpio -i
# mkdir lib/firmware/radeon
# mkdir lib/firmware/2.6.34.1-14.xenlinux.qubes.x86_64/radeon
# cp -R /lib/firmware/2.6.34.1-14.xenlinux.qubes.x86_64/radeon lib/firmware/radeon
# cp -R /lib/firmware/2.6.34.1-14.xenlinux.qubes.x86_64/radeon lib/firmware/2.6.34.1-14.xenlinux.qubes.x86_64/radeon
# mv /boot/initramfs-2.6.34.1-14.xenlinux.qubes.x86_64.img /boot/initramfs-2.6.34.1-14.xenlinux.qubes.x86_64.img.org
# dracut /boot/initramfs-2.6.34.1-14.xenlinux.qubes.x86_64.img

Using dracut to create the new initramfs image seems to be essential. Trying to pack it manually with cpio and gzip produced (a frustratingly large number of) unbootable images. There probably doesn't need to be two copies of the firmware under /lib/firmware/2.6.34.1-14.xenlinux.qubes.x86_64/radeon and /lib/firmware/radeon, but after wrestling with getting a bootable image, I decided to keep both there.

Hopefully this can be of use to anyone else having troubles with Radeon hardware acceleration under Qubes, and a possible bugfix for Beta 2.

Beyond this problem, everything has been incredibly smooth.

I'm looking forward to seeing future developments in this project.

Regards,
-Daniel Selifonov

[Joanna Rutkowska]

Thank a lot -- I will link your message from our User Guid in the wiki.

> Beyond this problem, everything has been incredibly smooth.
>

Glad to hear that!

> I'm looking forward to seeing future developments in this project.
>
> Regards,
> -Daniel Selifonov
>

Regards,
joanna.