Building coreboot from source (official script)

I’m a hybrid at the moment. I have a personal Librem 13v1 that was part of the original crowdfunding campaign and endorsed/supported by Qubes. It still has the original AMI BIOS as coreboot wasn’t out for it when I got it. It runs Qubes 3.2 and suspends OK.

Along with that I’ve been helping test Qubes for Purism on the newer Librem 13v2/15v3 (first on the side, now as a full-time employee) and so I’ve tested both 3.2 and the various 4.0 release candidates and saw first-hand the problems you are talking about.

@quban The main problem IOMMU seems to cause in the Qubes 4 series is in the fact that everything defaults to HVM where in the past VMs were typically running in PV mode. This means after you boot none of the VMs start because they depend on the sys-net VM which, when set to HVM mode, won’t start without IOMMU because it has PCI devices assigned to it. Other than that it seems to Suspend/Resume OK and install OK (if you ignore the IOMMU warnings). I’ve had success in Qubes 4 by opening a dom0 terminal and changing the VMs that have PCI devices attached (sys-net and sys-usb) to PV mode:

qvm-prefs sys-net virt_mode pv
qvm-prefs sys-usb virt_mode pv

I tried this on a fresh Qubes 4.0rc3 install and once I rebooted my VMs came up fine. Now it’s true that you lose all of the security benefits of IOMMU in this case, but at least the VMs run and it suspends/resumes. Also, this is just a temporary workaround until we complete IOMMU support.

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