Does anyone on here use dasharo and Qubes currently, ideally with the MSI z690 z790 boards ? Is it working or work in progress ?
I looked on the GitHub issues page for dasharo and it seems like there are a fair amount of open issues from 6-18 months ago. Things like ps/2 keyboard not working in uefi bios menu, upgrading memory causing lockup and needing MSI bios to be flashed again, issues caused by core boot that the original MSI bios doesn’t have a problem with.
Does ME disable work decently or cause basically unworkable issues ?
While I can’t say anything about Dasharo itself (still waiting for XMP to be stable), I can say that this board works very, very well with Qubes. I’d expect the same under Dasharo, but I have not tested that.
The reply to the GitHub issues says you need to flash Dasharo using the FlashBIOS method. The IFD region is locked by MSI, and it’s the only way to unlock it. It also says, in 0.9.4 the ME disable option is removed if IFD is locked, HAP is in that region, and you can change it when the region is locked.
On the motherboard there is a USB port and button marked as FlashBIOS, you just copy the firmware image to a USB device and place it in the USB port and push the button. The system will power on and flash the firmware.
You also needed to do this in 0.9.2, and you only need to do it once. When the IFD region is unlocked you can flash/update using the Dasharo tool.
Thanks for the explanation, I was confused whether flashBIOS referred to using an USB programmer with flashrom or the MSI flasher button. And I didn’t realize that the two different MSI flashing options actually used a different approach
On a different note, you mentioned you prefer AMD symmetrical cores approach vs intels E core/ P core hybrid. Is that because it doesn’t work any better than AMDs approach (the Intel added complexity should have added value to counter the complexity) or just that it is more work to incorporate into Qubes ?
I’m considering Intel 12th gen and whether to get something with E cores (12600k) or just P cores (12400). I like the idea of running the network related service qubes on E cores and adding them to the P cores during compilation but I’m not prepared to do a lot of tweaking settings
The hybrid cores just don’t work as intended when you are running VMs, they are designed to allow the scheduler to decide which core type should be used for a given process.
Running services VMs on the E cores is a band-aid solution, and with AMD you don’t need to worry about what core type is used.