Upgrading to Coreboot 4.7

Hi all,

Reading the latest news from Purism CISO (Qubes 4.0 fully working on Librem laptops, coreboot added IOMMU and TPM – Purism) I would like to upgrade my purism librem 13v2’s 4.6 bios to 4.7 so I can run Qubes 4 rc4 installer without errors.

Any guides out there, not breaking anything? Any safe experiences?

The following seems to have no luck, yet

sincerely
Max

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I’m glad I’m not the only one excited about the news. We will follow up with a guide on how to apply the recent update soon!

2 Likes

The latest news was just posted and the other forum post you just linked to specifically says :

I don’t know what other answer you are expecting here…

Actually I read this post earlier, apparently before this latest update, so with that in mind, I will await anxiously.

Thank you for your response
Sincerely
Max

Hi Kyle,

Thank you for your quick response. Do you know if the update also will resolve other current issues with Qubes 3.2 on Librem13v2?

My restored Kali from my lenovo Yoga 2 pro Qubes 3.2 installation, can’t boot on my purism, but works on the Lenovo. It also hangs.

And without rushing you in any way, do you have an ETA for the update? (are we talking days, weeks, or?)

thank you very much for your time.
Sincerely
Max

I believe that the Qubes 3.2 issues are unrelated. For instance I know that the Qubes 3.2 suspend issue is due to a bug in Xen 4.6 that is fixed in the Xen 4.8 that is shipped with Qubes 4. The Qubes 3.2 install problems I don’t think are related to IOMMU. You have to do that chroot grub-install trick that has been mentioned here in the forums to work around that.

For the update we are working on merging our changes with other upstream coreboot work on IOMMU on Skylake. We are still testing things and as far as ETA I think it’s closer to being days away instead of weeks provided the upstream merging doesn’t cause any major issues.

3 Likes

hey @max4 the qubes 3.2 not booting after initial install issue is not due to BIOS, it’s because the qubes installer didn’t install a boot loader. That’s what these posts are about:


I had some issues booting my Librem13v2 q3.2 backups when restored to q4.0rc3, but I think that might have been due to either qubes 4 shortcuts working differently or the run mode of the vm (pv vs hvm) Building coreboot from source (official script)

I know and have followed the workaround, by doing it manually. The interesting part is : “what is the root cause?”

Do you know? Is the missing boot loader because of the BIOS?

If Coreboot 4.7 solves the problem, I guess the answer is obvious. If not, I’m installing Qubes 4 anyway.

Sincerely
Max

From OP of the other thread:

Skips or fails?

The sad part is that I bought a Librem 13v2 to run Qubes on, and it simply doesn’t work quite as well as I expected. PureOS on the other hand ran perfectly and I expect to run PureOS as a VM in Qubes, and I will test it, when Coreboot 4.7 arrives. At the moment my old Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro is doing a great job, and I almost wished I could have thrown extra memory and a NVMe disk in that instead.

Counting the minutes before my very expensive “brick” comes to life with a coreboot update…

Sincerely
Max

Hi @Kyle_Rankin

Any updates on progress?

Sincerely
Max

There will also be a blog post but I didn’t want you to have to wait any longer!

Here’s the official blog post about the coreboot update with steps to build and flash: https://puri.sm/posts/february-2018-coreboot-update/

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Hi. Just reporting complete success updating to 4.7 on a Librem 15v3 using the instructions in the blog post, and reviewing the thread “Building Coreboot from source - (official script)” mentioned above.

My only minor comment is on the blog post itself, on the section “Verifying the presence of a TPM.” The reference to tpm_tools (with an underscore) should be tpm-tools (with a dash/hyphen). Not complaining, mind you! As a noob to the TPM Tools package, it took me a few minutes to see why at first I couldn’t find and install it.

Now, to dig into understanding the TPM, the use of the tpm_* CLI utilities, and to find out how the APIs work from C, etc.

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Upgrade according to the blog (minus a -/_ issue and a needed apt-get update' on the most recent pureoslive shell’ stick). TPM very functional now.

Two things worth of note - 1) the log shows a larger number of cpu-temperature control issues; and the fan comes on much more often (albeit shortly); also during boot. And 2) a `dd’ read from a raw disk has almost halved in speed.