Qubes 4.0 on MacBook Pro 13,3 won't boot

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Jakub Fedyczak

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Sep 8, 2018, 8:30:42 AM9/8/18

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Hi,

I'm trying to install Qubes 4.0 on external SSD drive on MacBook Pro 13,3. Installation boots from USB thumbdrive and works just fine.

After installation with default partitioning and rebooting, mac goes straight to blank screen with no logs at all and freezes.

When trying to boot with reFIT there is short message about loading kernel and vmlinuz but it goes to blank screen too.

I've checked xen.cfg - not empty, reFIT correctly sees both xen.efi and xen*.efi files.

I'll appreciate any help.

--
jf

Eric Shelton

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Sep 9, 2018, 3:33:59 PM9/9/18

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It's been a while since I tried getting a Mac running Qubes. A lot of the time, the problems with getting Qubes running are the same problems with getting Linux running on a machine. You might want to see this article from Nov 2017:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=mbp2016-linux-wreck&num=1

and this gist (for the comments for that article) detailing various problems and their solutions in getting your specific model working with Linux:

https://gist.github.com/roadrunner2/1289542a748d9a104e7baec6a92f9cd7

Another thing, at least with a MacBook Air 2012 5 1/2 years ago, I had to partition things in a particular way to get EFI boot to work -- rEFInd alone was not enough. Otherwise, I saw saw something similar -- installer ran, but Qubes would not boot. Details of that were posted here (not sure what happened to the original post, but it can be seen in the followup posts):

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/qubes-devel/uLDYGdKk_Dk/FsnYulsNG50J

I think I have seen Mac users in later years use that to get Qubes booting. I would start along those lines first, as digging into other things will likely be harder.

If you want to remove some of the Qubes-specific variables from this process, such as the use of virtualization features, maybe start with trying to get Fedora installed and running first.

Finally, I learned that the ACPI tables are not always 100% correct with the Macs. Specifically, I encountered a bug in a ACPI DMAR table that kept Qubes from using Vt-d. It would boot, but Vt-d was not enabled:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/qubes-devel/uLDYGdKk_Dk/aV4QncBokooJ

I eventually worked up a hack to get Xen to work around the faulty table to get Vt-d enabled, but investigating and solving something like that is well outside of the usual "having trouble getting Linux working on my laptop" types of woes.