Sys-usb problem

User Support
1

Hello community

I am having an issue with my usb-sys that I had several month ago and was quite easy to fix. Unfortunately, I didn’t write down the solution on a piece of paper as a reference. Today the power to our house was shut down. I had forgotton about it so Qubes OS suddenly went without power and the shutdown was not clean therefore.

Now, as the power was back up I stated my computer entered the passphrase and like a few month ago I was not able to use the keyboard to enter to logon password.

I remembered a few steps and got it working to some extent but the qubes won’t start automatically anymore.

Here is what I have done:

I added

qubes.skip_autostart

in the kernel parameters. This allowed me to log in into Qubes OS 4.3.0.

I then asked ChatGPT for help and entered these commands:

:one: Remove old/broken sys-usb (if still present)

qvm-shutdown sys-usb
qvm-remove sys-usb --force

:two: Create new sys-usb (StandaloneVM, label optional)

qvm-create sys-usb --class StandaloneVM --label red

:three: Set autostart

qvm-prefs sys-usb autostart true

:four: Reboot so USB devices attach automatically

reboot

I then rebooted and after logging in I discovered that none of the system qubes such as sys-net, sys-usb, sys-firewall have started.

When I right-click on the freshly created sys-usb qubes I get an error that does not make sense at all because I have been using Qubes OS on this hardware for 8+ years without problems at all:

“Failed to start an HVM qube with PCI devices assigned. hardware does not support IOMMU/VT-d/AMD-Vi”

Could it have to do with the --force command in qvm-remove sys-usb --force? ChatGT wrote that this qould remove all config files as well. Or did I forget a step?

Thank you in advance.

2

Your LLM hallucinated completely incorrect instructions… There’s almost no situation in which you’d want your sys-usb to be a StandaloneVM. It should be a DisposableVM or AppVM.

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3

You can recreate your sys-usb (and other qubes created at setup) by
reusing the salt formulae at /srv/formulas/base/virtual-machines-formula/qvm

You do this using sudo qubesctl state.apply qvm.sys-usb to recreate
the sys-usb. As you can see from that directory you can recreate most of
the stock qubes from here.

I never presume to speak for the Qubes team. When I comment in the Forum I speak for myself.
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