Qubes OS 3.2 and my BCM4313
So when I followed the installation instructions of Qubes 3.2 and got to the second stage of installing the system (after files had been copied, directly after the first reboot) the system froze during "network setup" and I had to cold start my laptop. Looking for similar issues and solutions was quite the challenge and involved sifting through Google groups threads which had some contradicting answers.
In my case the culprit was the wireless card, a BCM4313, and a too restrictive PCI arb. So I reinstalled and disabled my wifi card in the BIOS for this setup. Everything went smooth now and I could finish the installation, but the system was still a little bit unstable.
I have the laptop connected to an external monitor via HDMI and the system was trying to initialize pulseaudio and could not properly connect to the audio output (monitor does not have one). So pulseaudio was going to 100% cpu usage every few seconds trying to initialize the output.
No problem, I plugged out the HDMI for now so I can properly work with the system. I tried again to find some similar issues and solutions, but I could only find some very vague and sometimes contradicting answers. At this point I connected the laptop to the network via ethernet and was able to update the dom0 admin vm. After a reboot the pulseaudio issues were gone and the system seemed a lot more responsive overall.
So if you are having similar issues and a general un-responsiveness after a fresh Qubes OS 3.2 installation, the first thing you should do is update the admin vm and reboot. Enabling the wifi card in BIOS and starting the OS was now O.K. too, but as soon as I would attach the wifi card to the sys-net vm my laptop would freeze again.
The solution was on the "assigning devices" documentation page, I had to follow the section "pci passthrough issues" to solve the problem: https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/assigning-devices/
That was everything I had to do to get the laptop up and running with Qubes OS. It is a very nice operating system for a lot of interesting use cases, some of which I'll describe in upcoming posts.
In my case the culprit was the wireless card, a BCM4313, and a too restrictive PCI arb. So I reinstalled and disabled my wifi card in the BIOS for this setup. Everything went smooth now and I could finish the installation, but the system was still a little bit unstable.
I have the laptop connected to an external monitor via HDMI and the system was trying to initialize pulseaudio and could not properly connect to the audio output (monitor does not have one). So pulseaudio was going to 100% cpu usage every few seconds trying to initialize the output.
No problem, I plugged out the HDMI for now so I can properly work with the system. I tried again to find some similar issues and solutions, but I could only find some very vague and sometimes contradicting answers. At this point I connected the laptop to the network via ethernet and was able to update the dom0 admin vm. After a reboot the pulseaudio issues were gone and the system seemed a lot more responsive overall.
So if you are having similar issues and a general un-responsiveness after a fresh Qubes OS 3.2 installation, the first thing you should do is update the admin vm and reboot. Enabling the wifi card in BIOS and starting the OS was now O.K. too, but as soon as I would attach the wifi card to the sys-net vm my laptop would freeze again.
The solution was on the "assigning devices" documentation page, I had to follow the section "pci passthrough issues" to solve the problem: https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/assigning-devices/
That was everything I had to do to get the laptop up and running with Qubes OS. It is a very nice operating system for a lot of interesting use cases, some of which I'll describe in upcoming posts.
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