Installing Qubes with alternative kernel (not the bundled kernel). Possible?

User Support
1

I have a laptop with a built in NVME drive that the Qubes installer can’t handle: This issue

I have some other linux images that are able to see this device just fine. It seems to be a kernel issue.

I wonder if it’s possible / advisable to try to swap the kernel in the installation USB and how one might start? There are some howtos to do this kind of thing with simpler distros (Mint, Kali and Majaro are the ones I found). IDK yet how applicable they are (or not) to the Qubes installer. I’ll start tinkering with that in a bit.

Any thoughts about this madness?

2

You can try the latest Qubes ISO build with kernel-latest:
Index of /qubes/iso/

3

First thing I tried.

4

I don’t think it’s a problem with kernel version.
Latest Fedora-36 ISO has kernel 5.17.5 and latest Qubes ISO with kernel-latest has kernel 5.17.7.
Maybe some kernel modules were excluded from Qubes kernel build compared to Fedora kernel build.
Or maybe it’s a problem with some other package and not with kernel.

First you can compare kernel configs between Qubes kernel and Fedora kernel and look for some NVMe options that differ between them.
Then you can try to build Qubes ISO with your own kernel config:
Qubes ISO building | Qubes OS
Qubes builder | Qubes OS

1 Like
5

Fedora sees the NVME drive no problem, so I’m starting there. You’re right, it probably is a configuration thing or a missing module. Thank you for that thought. We’ll see how it goes.

6

I’ve been tinkering with this for two weeks now with no luck. I think Qubes on this hardware is just sadly not happening.

Maybe I’ll try again in six months.