How to upgrade to Qubes 4.1

Hello,

Attempted an in-place upgrade from 4.0 to 4.1 but experiencing an issue booting any AppVM or TemplateVM other than dom0. The error message returned is:

“Cannot connect to qrexec agent for 60 seconds, see /var/log/xen/console/guest-sys-net.log for
details”

When checking the log file for errors, I see a systemd error message:

systemd: systemd-fsck-root.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE
systemd-fsck-root.service: Failed with result ‘exit-code’
Failed to start File System Check on Root Device

from reading some of the other forum posts regarding this upgrade, it seems there is an issue with
the qrexec-agent version of the VM as compared with the qrexec-daemon version running in dom0

This part in particular:

After reviewing what each stage does, I’m left with the impression that stage1 updates VM with 4.1 qrexec-agent, which fails to work with 4.0 qrexec-daemon, and that the 4.1 qrexec-daemon only gets installed in stage4.

Indeed this is exactly what happens. New qrexec-daemon works with old qrexec-agent, but not the other way around. The VM update is put before dom0 update only to allow saving one reboot during the process - otherwise VM can be updated after dom0. And in fact you can do that - proceed with subsequent stages and retry sage 2 at the end.

When attempting to run STAGE4, the same qrexec error returns and the stage fails.

Prior to attempting the upgrade I made a backup of all the VMs on an external media.

My question is… how best to proceed at this point? When I connect any external device using USB,

it’s not recognized by dom0 and the USB qube will not boot at all due to the fedora-33 template

dependency.

Thank You

So if you don’t want to debug the issue, you can install fresh 4.1 and restore the VMs from your backup, which is the recommended way of upgrading Qubes.

And if I want to debug the issue instead of installing from scratch?

I don’t see in your description whether you tried rebooting Qubes itself, but it looks similar to my case, where I expected to be able to start the VMs directly, whereas the old qubes would not allow that, and a machine reboot was required.

I was able to successfully flash the USB with the R4.1.iso file. When the USB is booted, there are 2 partitions available, (sda1 and sda2) when trying to boot one of the options within the sda1 partition, there is an error message regarding the loading of the X Window system:

X startup failed, aborting installation
timeout trying to start Xorg

I note this issue is similar to the issue I have posted.