On Wed, November 29, 2017 16:35, Ivan Ivanov wrote:
Hi awokd,
Hi and thanks for your reply!
are you sure that your HVM is correctly installed / has a correct config ? Because: you may have heard about Qubes OS - excellent OS which is based on Xen, has the same and even stronger security than Xen in some cases, and it is working perfectly at Lenovo G505S laptop with coreboot installed
Qubes 4.0 is actually my end target usage scenario, however it defaults to using HVMs (vs. 3.2 which defaulted to PV) so I was unable to run it at all until I managed to switch everything to PV. I ruled the freezes out as a Qubes issue by performing a fresh install of Fedora 26, and installing Xen 4.8.2 from repository on it. Creating and starting PVs worked but I was able to recreate the lock up by creating a HVM on Xen and trying to start it.
Please go to Qubes HCL hardware compatibility list page - https://www.qubes-os.org/hcl/ , and look at G505S report for Qubes R3.2 version - both HVM and IOMMU and even SLAT : all these hardware virtualization functions are working perfectly.
Mine reports they are enabled as well, it's just when I attempt to use an HVM I'm experiencing the freeze! Thus my plea for help to the list to see if anyone has actually tried to use an HVM on this Corebooted hardware.
also please read this message: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/qubes-users/TS1zfKZ7q8w/JQFkVF4xBgAJ it contains a link to a forum post with attachments, not just .config but also the coreboot G505S binaries which have been tested with Qubes OS (yes they have been done almost 1 year ago, outdated, but they contain some nice extra stuff)
I did see that post, thank you. It was one of the ones that convinced me to buy this particular laptop for Qubes usage. I followed the guide in the forum link to build Coreboot. I've tried it with and without Yabel and multiple other settings but they've all resulted in the freeze.
about 0 bytes cpu_microcode_blob.bin - if you look at the memory map of 1 year old coreboot G505S build, (provided below), there is no microcode. My guess is that no microcode is needed for A10-5750M APU, it is Richland architecture which is pretty refined, not even sure if the microcode updates exist for this one - please tell me if I'm wrong here
Maybe there isn't one at all. The processor isn't that old but it's already hard to find vendor documentation on it.
If I can't find anyone who can verify success with HVMs, my next step will be to try KVM and ESXi on it to see if I can recreate the issue. Last resort is to flash back the OEM image but I'm hoping to avoid that.