How to upgrade to Qubes 4.1

User Support
#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

#2

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.

#3

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

#4

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.

#5

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

#6

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