Upgrading to Coreboot 4.7

[max4]

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

Building coreboot from source (official script)

Sure, you could do that, although I’d suggest booting PureOS in live USB mode instead, since that’s what I tested but as far as I know, PureOS and Debian are pretty much the same.

sincerely
Max

[Kyle_Rankin]

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!

[kakaroto]

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

We are finishing up testing and cleaning up the code a bit, and then we will publish it so you can update.

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

[max4]

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

[max4]

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?

Librem 13v2: Qubes stuck at "Booting from Hard Disk" after install

Hello! Yesterday I got my 13v2 with a 250GB SSD, have installed Qubes os 3.2 on it but I have the same problem. I tried many times to fix it with all your precious informations: It seems to work correctly in the troobleshooting, but here is the result when I reboot: Booting from Hard Disk... . error: no such device: 626f3abe-d6eb-423a-a751-b4ffbc450e08 Entering rescue mode... grub rescue> Here (with lsblk) we can see that the installation target is sda and not sdb: [Qubes os - lsblk] Now I…

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

[Kyle_Rankin]

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.

[quban]

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:

Librem 13v2: Qubes stuck at "Booting from Hard Disk" after install

Recently received my librem. I notice the same issue. I used the same steps above except with: GRUB_CMDLINE_XEN_DEFAULT=“console=none dom0_mem=2048M,max:2048M” Therefore have static mem as recommended here: https://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Xen_Project_Best_Practices Also booting OK. . .

Librem 13v2: Qubes stuck at "Booting from Hard Disk" after install

It seems that the Librems are shipped with coreboot with a SeaBIOS payload. Unfortunately, the Qubes OS installer doesn't play too nicely with this configuration and installs properly but does not boot. On my Librem 13v2, I get SeaBIOS (version rel-1.10.0-51-g7759d3a) Booting from Hard Disk... _ This is apparently a known issue: https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/2553. It looks like it's been fixed for Qubes 4.0 (by simply disabling coreboot detection), but for now we're stuck wit…

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)

[max4]

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

[quban]

From OP of the other thread:

Librem 13v2: Qubes stuck at "Booting from Hard Disk" after install

… the 3.2 installer (which still skips installing GRUB if coreboot is present).

[max4]

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

[max4]

Hi @Kyle_Rankin

Any updates on progress?

Sincerely
Max

[Kyle_Rankin]

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

Building coreboot from source (official script)

Hey everyone! The build script was just updated to build the newest update to coreboot. The Changelog.txt shows what has changed, with the most important/requested feature being the support for IOMMU/VT-d for all of you Qubes 4.0 users out there. The new image also adds TPM support for those of you who ordered the machine with the TPM module installed. I’ll update the first post in this thread in a couple of days (I can’t edit it now due to a time limit for edits in the forum’s configuration),…

[Kyle_Rankin]

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

[clark]

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.

[dirkx]

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.