Hello, I have a standalone Fedora 41 Linux Qube which has proprietary software + kernel modules in it and after a recent update, it seems to be crashing early in the systemd boot process. Normally I would debug this by dropping to a systemd emergency shell in a console and viewing the failed syetemd unit logs but I am unsure how to even get an interactive shell this early in the boot process as the qubes services are among the failed processes. When I explicitly set the kernel boot parameters to take me to an emergency shell, I get a message about the root account being disabled and that there is nothing further for systemd to do. I’m sure I can mount the root volume in dom0 and enable the root account and set a password, but this feels like the incorrect path.
How do I properly debug this?
I was unable to find documentation or related forum posts. Thanks in advance!
You can connect to the qube’s console using this command in dom0:
qvm-console-dispvm qubename
This works in most cases but I cannot interact with the console if the system has booted too far. If I restart the VM and request the console access, the system has already booted too far to see what broke when the disposable VM starts and presents a console. I was able to find that I can use /var/log/xen/console/guest-<vmname>.log to see that some systemd services fail early in the boot process
The bigger issue is that I need to interact with systemd to figure out why some qubes-critical services seem to fail to load in the early boot process among other issues which cause the VM to fail to boot.
The larger problem (to avoid the xy problem here) is that I have to use out-of-tree kernel modules which seems to be failing to boot and I didn’t quite understand how to get them installed into an untrusted VM and how to debug the VM when it breaks.
Thanks for the help.
You can use this to debug:
Diagnosing Boot Problems
qvm-start appVM && qvm-console-dispvm appVM
is showing everything from 0.0
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