Have been using Qubes for over 2 years and as my version (R4.1) was no longer supported, I set myself to install a clean recent version. I use a Minisforum HX90 with a AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX, 16GB RAM and 2TB SSD and the previous install worked perfectly, although without a usb-qube. The PC has only UBS ports for keyboard and mouse.
My first try at installing failed at the Initial Setup when starting Setup Networking with a spontaneous reboot. (2nd and 3rd identical - I know doing the same and expecting different results is …)
After installing without creating the sys-usb qube in the Initial Setup, the process finished succesfully. Manually creating the sys-usb worked and lets me connect a USB-key to a specific App-VM. But after shutting down and restarting my system reboots after entering the passphrase.
My last effort was installing without the sys-usb in Initial Setup, creating it manually afterwards and preventing it from starting at systemstart. But then my system reboots as soon as I try to start the sys-usb by hand.
Maybe I should accept I am not able to use the usb-qube on my system, but if there is someone willing to help me get it fixed, it would make me very happy and thankful.
(Yse, I have been reading every post regarding sys-usb, but did not find a solution)
To me it looks like you are attaching wrong device to a sys-usb, or proper device is already attached to some other qube. More info on that would help us to help you.
I’ve read here a lot of people somehow ended up usb controller device somehow already attached to sys-firewal, which caused issues that looks like yours. You are probably also out of luck at all if you have only one controller.
Thank you for your reply and your thoughts.
This process became quite cumbersome as I have had to do a new clean install every time I tried another setting, because my system then just reboots every time.
What really puzzled me is that when I skip the automatic creation of sys-usb in the Setup I end up with a working system. When I then create the sys_usb with
sudo qubesctl state.sls qvm.sys-usb
I directly get what I expected (keyboard and mouse still working; inserting USB-drive lets me assign it to a running App-VM) but 1) the newly created sys-usb does not appear to be running (no green dot in Qube Manager!) and 2) when I shutdown and restart the system it lets me enter my disk pass phrase but then reboots and 3) if I disable the autostart of the sys-usb I can start the system and get to the desktop, but as soon as I start the sys-usb qube I get a reboot.
But your last remark made me question the number of controllers in my PC.
Following:
I entered the usb busses I found with lsusb (in dom0, that is to say) into
readlink /sys/bus/usb/devices/usb3
and got
pci0000.:00/0000:00:8.1/0000:04:00.3 for usb1 and usb2 and
pci0000.:00/0000:00:8.1/0000:04:00.4 for usb3 and usb4
Does this mean I have 2 USB controllers?
Bus 001 and Bus 003 appear to be USB2.0
Bus 002 and Bus 004 appear to be USB3.0
If they are all on the same controller, I can stop my efforts.
What do you make of my findings?
I’m a visual guy. For this to check, I’d go to "Settings: of any qube from Qube Manager, and would check “Devices” tab. Far more readable and user friendlier to conclude what I have of devices…
You are right, thank you.
With
lspci | grep -i USB
I found out that there are indeed two USB controllers.
04:00.3 and 04:00.4
and they appear in the Devices tab of the Settings also.
If I manually create a new qube, call is sys-usb and only connect the second USB controller in the Devices, would the first controller still remain connected to dom0? Would that work?
Yep. Just be sure no other qube has the same controller attached to it, too.
You were so right!
Thank you very much. I now have a working system as I hoped for.
What I still do not understand (it is so counter intuitive) is that I created this sys-usb qube, and it works, but this qube is NOT running. (I turned off the autostart for this qube). I do not complain, I’m just amazed.
But THANK YOU! You saved my day (that is to say: what’s let of it)
Good to hear. You can consider to mark some post as solution. That way it would help other users to find the solution when they have same or similar issue.