Sys-gui installed but no session menu for it on login screen?

User Support General
1

Hi,

I am willing to give GUI domain a try. I have followed the documentation for the hybrid version. As a final step it instructs:

“At this point, you need to shutdown all your running qubes as the default_guivm qubes global property has been set to sys-gui.”

So, I have rebooted the computer.

“In order to use sys-gui as GUI domain, you need to logout and, in the top right corner, select lightdm session type to GUI domain (sys-gui).”

OK but there is no such option on top right. There I have only one choice - XFCE Session. I can simply login as usual and I don’t see any changes, apart from a running VM named sys-gui. Executing systemctl status lightdm shows that this service is running but I don’t notice any speed up of visual UI. For example, the scrolling in the text editor of the default “untrusted” VM is still choppy.

What should I do to actually use the sys-gui?

2

Sys-gui is not about pass-through graphics acceleration to VMs, it’s for isolation of graphical devices from dom0 for security reasons:
Qubes Architecture Next Steps: The GUI Domain | Qubes OS

3

Even so, there is no session option on login interface and the question remains.
What should I do?

4

I still hope for feedback.

5

I didn’t try sys-gui myself so I can’t help you out here. I can just guess that you missed something during sys-gui setup and it didn’t install properly. I can just suggest you to look through these threads and try to figure out what’s missing:

6

I didn’t try sys-gui myself so I can’t help you out here.

Thanks for clarifying.

I can just guess that you missed something during sys-gui setup and it didn’t install properly.

That’s not true. I did exactly what the documentation says.

I hope someone who has experience to help as I am careful not to mess up something and not be able to use Qubes OS as a result.

7

I have gone through all the threads you linked but there is no answer to my question there.

Something more: I tested what one of the threads suggests and created a test-vm, then I set its guivm to sys-gui through qvm-prefs. Then I tried to run apps in test-vm (XTerm, Firefox). Result: nothing shows. I also notice that I can’t even open a terminal in sys-gui itself. OTOH, I notice some CPU load (~14%) on sys-gui when looking at the running Qubes in tray menu, even with test-vm not running at all.

I really hope someone can shed some light on this.

8

I kindly ask again for help.
I hope that’s not considered inappropriate.

9

I’d try to reinstall the sys-gui and see if there are any errors or warnings in the qubesctl commands output. Or post the logs here.

10

The section in documentation called “Delete GUI domain” explains how to set default_guivm as dom0. However, this seems unnecessary in my case as it already is dom0. Right?

Also, when I installed the sys-gui there were no error messages when running the qubesctl commands, only success was reported, so there is nothing to post.

This is quite confusing.
What should I do?

11

That means that something went wrong during installation because default_guivm should’ve beed set to sys-gui:

At this point, you need to shutdown all your running qubes as the default_guivm qubes global property has been set to sys-gui.

12

That means that something went wrong during installation

How do I know what that something is?

13

I don’t know what could go wrong. Try to reinstall sys-gui and check the logs in journalctl and in /var/log/qubes/*sys-gui.log.

14

I don’t know what could go wrong.

How do I find someone who knows?

Try to reinstall sys-gui and check the logs in journalctl and in /var/log/qubes/*sys-gui.log.

Which logs (in which VM)?

15

I don’t know much about sys gui but /var/log/qubes/*sys-gui.log will be on dom0.

16

If you tried to reinstall sys-gui but the problem remains then you can open an issue on github:
Issues · QubesOS/qubes-issues · GitHub

17

After giving up on sys-gui and removing it from the system, today I decided to try sys-gui-gpu, as I do have an Intel VGA (integrated in the CPU).

Following strictly the instructions in the docs, after rebooting, I was unable to use sys-gui-gpu too - after login, it is not running. The moment I attempt to start it manually, the whole computer experiences a hard reset. I retried the whole procedure but that didn’t change anything, except that the second time the system reset happened instantly at the last step:

sudo qubesctl state.sls qvm.sys-gui-gpu-attach-gpu

After booting, next attempts to start sys-gui-gpu resulted in the same - hard system reset. I looked at /var/log/qubes/*sys-gui-gpu.log files but saw nothing informative:

/var/log/qubes/qubesdb.disp-mgmt-sys-gui-gpu.log
vchan closed
reconnecting
vchan closed
/var/log/qubes/qrexec.disp-mgmt-sys-gui-gpu.log
/var/log/qubes/qubesdb.sys-gui-gpu.log
vchan closed
reconnecting
vchan closed
/var/log/qubes/mgmt-sys-gui-gpu.log
2023-09-18 14:11:58,819 calling 'state.highstate'...
2023-09-18 14:12:47,405 output: sys-gui-gpu:
2023-09-18 14:12:47,406 output: ----------
[...] 
2023-09-18 14:12:47,408 output: Summary for sys-gui-gpu
2023-09-18 14:12:47,408 output: ------------
2023-09-18 14:12:47,409 output: Succeeded: 4 (changed=4)
2023-09-18 14:12:47,409 output: Failed:    0
2023-09-18 14:12:47,409 output: ------------
2023-09-18 14:12:47,409 output: Total states run:     4
2023-09-18 14:12:47,409 output: Total run time:  66.089 ms
2023-09-18 14:12:47,409 exit code: 0
2023-09-18 15:10:16,171 calling 'state.highstate'...
/var/log/qubes/qrexec.sys-gui-gpu.log
2023-09-18 14:12:47.509 qrexec-daemon[46478]: qrexec-daemon.c:1264:main: qrexec-agent has disconnected
domain dead
2023-09-18 14:12:48.469 qrexec-daemon[46478]: qrexec-daemon.c:1149:handle_agent_restart: cannot connect to qrexec agent: No such process
2023-09-18 14:12:48.469 qrexec-daemon[46478]: qrexec-daemon.c:1266:main: Failed to reconnect to qrexec-agent, terminating

I thought it might be a good idea to share this here before submitting any bug reports. Hopefully, someone may provide some feedback if there is anything that can be done to make this work.