Librem 13v2: Qubes fails to resume from suspend

In light of our shipping-from-inventory fulfillment model having recently begun and in order to answer questions we have been getting related to pre-loaded versions of Qubes OS, we would like to announce that we will be fulfilling Qubes-related pending orders made until now by offering the Qubes install as a complimentary USB key included at no additional charge in those shipments.

mladen, Originally I ordered my Librem on November 1 in part because in was “certified” to run Qubes, so I expected a laptop that would work flawlessly with it. After the delays, I agreed to let purism ship the laptop with a blank drive since $1700 of mine had been held over half a year, and there was no OEM Qubes image you could use.

It seems my order was shipped while I was on vacation, possibly just before the July 4 publication of the above post. So I did not know of the availability of a Qubes installation USB.

After having tried to install Qubes 3.2 on the Librem 13 v2, I ran into the grub-install issue and the suggested work-around succeeded. However I found that Qubes crashes when resuming from either suspend or hibernate. A user on the #purism IRC channel suggested I downgrade the kernel to 4.9, however Qubes 3.2 installs a much older kernel to begin with.

I am not sure what to do next. Can you recommend a way to get a working Qubes installation on a Librem 13 v2?

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AFAIK, the latest dom0 kernel available for Qubes 3.2 is 4.8.7, which you can install by following by temporarily enabling the unstable repositories. Unfortunately, sleep was still broken in 4.8.7. This is the point where I gave up on Qubes and switched to Linux Mint.

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You may have luck with a later kernel if you compile it yourself.

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With a pointer from user noti[m] on #qubes IRC, we I tried kernel-4.9.35-19. This kernel currently works in noti[m]'s T530, but it did not change the behavior I am seeing on the Librem 13 v2. When I open the lid, the radio and power lights are white, but the screen remains blank, and I must hard-power-down.

EDIT: the IRC channel was #qubes, not #purism

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Vanilla fedora core 23 works with suspend/resume; kernel-4.8.13-100.fc23.x86_64 on the librem 13 v2.

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Has anyone else had trouble with suspend/resume?

I have opened an issue 2922 with Qubes to try to debug.

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Notable update: suspend, but not hibernate, works on a pre-release Qubes 4.0 installation. Details are in the issue.

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Qubes OS doesn’t support hibernation. The Xen hypervisor which Qubes OS (currently) relies on doesn’t support hibernation.

Sadly this is not easy to discover from the Qubes OS web site.

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Thanks @Joe, that is informative. I am hopeful we can look forward to working suspend on the Librem 13v2 with a future Qubes release.

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A Qubes 4.0 release is expected relatively soon.

I have verified suspend/resume on the Librem 13v2 works fine with a test image of Qubes 4.0.

It may be possible to hack Qubes 3.2 to work too, and I have had limited success with package upgrades, but I will not experiment further considering the above.

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d2r, thank you for getting to the bottom of this.

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@mladen Regarding the communication that this post has been Solved, I see the scope of a solution differently.

The expected solution would result in a functional Qubes installation in addition to successful suspend/resume.

The actual result with the image I tested did not have a working DisposableVM or qubes vm settings utility that supported creation of standalone VMs. The image I tested was pre-RC1, and so it is not unexpected that the system does not work.

So in my opinion there is not yet a solution, but a solution is expected with the next release of Qubes.

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Makes sense, corrected. Thanks!

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FYI, Qubes 4.0 rc1 was released 2 days ago : https://www.qubes-os.org/news/2017/07/31/qubes-40-rc1/

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OK, tried rc1. Suspend/Resume still works. Other features seem not to work correctly yet. Stand-alone VMs are disabled, the disposable vm seems to be persisting data, and the whonix installation/configuration apparently fails as I do not see the app vm or template present after the installation. It doesn’t look like it is ready for release yet.

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Just a note to anyone else considering purchasing a Librem in order to run Qubes: Purism does not provide support for this, but it should work with Qubes 4.

Purism is staffed to focus on PureOS, and that makes perfect sense. When I ordered, there was a contract in place between Purism and Qubes that was to effect Qubes Certification for the Librem 13v2. But by the time the hardware shipped, this contract was no longer in effect. There are good reasons for this that have been discussed in other threads. My understanding is that the hardware changed significantly enough with the v2 that the scope of effort needed to fully test was not covered by the contract for the original Librem, and the new contract offered for the v2 from Qubes ended up being too costly.

The good news is that at this time there do not appear to be any technical issues that would outright prevent Qubes on the Librem 13v2. I am told the Purism folks do not mind if the community is interested, and I can say that my participation in both the Purism and Qubes communities so far has been very positive. Just don’t expect it to work out of the box quite yet.

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