Which Framework laptop 13 mainboard works fully functional well with QubesOS? I did asked in QubesOS forum about Framework laptop 13. But none of mainboard of Framework Laptop 13 are working out of the box.
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The qubes forums were correct, it won’t work out of the box. That sort of comes with the territory though for qubes, it always requires some tinkering. I was able to get it running on my 12th gen without too much trouble, but of course performance wasn’t great.
Caveat though: Framework does not provide firmware security updates for its products. You’ll be lucky to get a single patch within the lifetime of a mainboard. So if you actually need qubes-level security and aren’t just playing with it for fun, you should consider a vendor that provides firmware support (basically any manufacturer other than framework).
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So, which vendor do you recommended to me?
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I’m also curious about this, I was hoping to move to Framework 13 with a sizable RAM for Qubes OS. If I wanted to go through, would you recommend Intel over AMD (all-else being equal)?
I appreciate you highlighting the firmware support issue, that’s a big consideration.
This has been a consistent failing, however they appear to be making a lot of progress in this area over the last six months.
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They’re not as timely as we’d wish, but the updates are provided - the oldest gen fw13 just got a bios update a few weeks ago
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Most laptops do require a little tweaking for working with Qubes. Officially certified laptops would get the best support.
That being said, I’ve run qubes on a few different framework mainboards. I find that intel tends to work a bit better than AMD performance wise. An Intel 13th Gen mainboard with the non-2.8k display would have the best compatibility. The Intel Ultra Series 1 doesn’t have GPU acceleration support in dom0 for Qubes R4.2. This causes additional slowdowns and framerate issue. (This does work fine in the R4.3 alpha).
You can get Intel SRIOV support with a custom kernel for GPU acceleration inside VMs. However, I’m not sure how much attack surface area this exposes.
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This is super helpful, thank you so much!
This is a rookie question but just to confirm, I can get up to 64GB of RAM (2 x 32 GB DDR4s) supported on the 13th Gen board, right?
I’m planning on running a lot of qubes at the same time (my current 16GB laptop can’t handle it) and want to make sure I have a high cieling for RAM upgrade.
Separaretly, it looks like a couple of people have gotten Qubes working on Ultra Series 1 from the hardware compatibility list, which is encouraging. And it’s a great that 4.3 alpha is working fine with it.
64gb works fine. I had 64gb in mine.
The laptop with the ultra series 1 will work fine, except that the modesettings driver that Fedora 37 ships is too old to support it, so it falls back to llvmpipe (cpu acceleration) You may or may not notice the difference. By default all of the qubes vms use llvmpipe at something like 40hz refresh. I’m unsure if you can install newer fedora xorg packages or not. I didn’t take the time to see what I could do to get it working in 4.2
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Amazing, thanks so much for confirming the RAM upgrade and adding more context about the new architecture!
Happy to say that my FW13 AMD 7640U works great with 128GB (64GB x 2) RAM installed.
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