Xen causes kernel panic during install - USB boot

[orjanj]

Qubes OS version
Qubes Release 4.0.2-rc1

Affected component(s) or functionality
XEN.

Brief summary
Trying to install Qubes on a Asus Zenbook UX433FN (yes, it's not under the hardware list, the 4.0.1 release didn't work, but the 4.0.2 got me further in to the installation; seems like it's working almost!) and I get a kernel panic.
The fully message can be seen below and in a attached screenshot.

To Reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. To stop the boot loop I've added 'noapic acpi=off' to the options in BOOTX64.cfg.
   Also tried to add 'dis_ucode_ldr' (no effect).
2. Inserted the USB drive to the laptop and tried to boot it.
3. Got kernel panic (message shown below).

Expected behavior
Expecting to see a installation menu.

Actual behavior
Kernel Panic.

Screenshots
Could be found here.

Additional context
The screenshots shows the message below in more details;

(XEN) Xen BUG at x86_64/mm.c:691
(XEN) ----[ Xen-4.8.5-7.fc25 x86_64 debug=n Not tained ]----
(XEN) CPU: 0
(XEN) RIP: e008:[] zap_low_mappings+0x68/0x70
(XEN) RFLAGS: 0000000000010097 CONTEXT: hypervisor
...
...
(XEN) Xen code around (zap_low_mappings+0x68/0x70):
(XEN) ff 0f 1f 80 00 00 00 00 <0f> 0b 66 0f 1f 44 00 00 41 57 41 56 49 be 00 00
(XEN) Xen stack trace from rsp=ffff82d080827da0:
...
...
(XEN) Xen call trace:
(XEN) [] zap_low_mappings+0x68/0x70
(XEN) [] __start_xen+0x2041/0x3630
(XEN)
(XEN)
(XEN) ******************************************
(XEN) Panic on CPU 0:
(XEN) Xen BUG at x86_64/mm.c:691
(XEN) ******************************************
(XEN)
(XEN) Reboot in five seconds...

Solutions you've tried
Adding dis_ucode_ldr to the BOOTX64.cfg file (this did work to initialise a Ubuntu LiveCD, without this param you were unable to boot Ubuntu).
Have also added 'noapic acpi=off' to the options line in BOOTX64.cfg, without getting further.
Also tried to add 'nouveau.modeset=0', no changes to this.

Hardware (Asus Zenbook UX433FN):

• Intel i7 8565U
• NVIDIA GeForce MX150

Relevant documentation you've consulted
UEFI troubleshooting.

Related, non-duplicate issues
None.

[brolund]

I have the same issue and error message after using the

noapic acpi=off

to get past panic

IO-APIC + timer doesn't work!

Hardware: Dell XPS 13 7390 2-in-1

[orjanj]

Have tried the same steps with the *-rc2 and still doesn't work.
Are looking into if there's any other params to use to go around this issue.
Any new status in this issue @andrewdavidwong?

Edit:
Have also tried the following parameter without success:
acpi_skip_timer_override

[andrewdavidwong]

Any new status in this issue @andrewdavidwong?

Nope.

[hs-j]

Here is my error message (Dell XPS 13 7390 2-in-1 [i7-1065G7]). This is simply booting off a flash drive with Qubes-R4.0.3-x86_64.iso dd'ed onto it without editing anything.

sudo dd if=Qubes-R4.0.3-x86_64.iso of=/dev/sdb && sync

My initial naive thought was that fastboot was messing with it somehow. I tried disabling it both in BIOS and Windows to no avail.

[marmarek]

The key message is "MP-BIOS bug: 8254 timer not connected to IO-APIC".
First, try updating BIOS, as this looks like a BIOS bug. If that doesn't help, add apic_verbosity=debug option to get more details.
But I'm afraid the only option to get it working is to Dell fix the BIOS bug, software workarounds are unlikely to help here.

[hs-j]

@marmarek, I'm quite inexperienced in debugging such problems. I updated my BIOS to the latest version (1.1.3, 10/11/2019) which didn't change anything. I then mounted the EFI partition of my flash drive, appended "apic_verbosity=debug" to the /EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.cfg file, and unmounted. This didn't change my output at all, which makes me think this is the wrong file to modify. Where should I be adding the "apic_verbosity=debug" option?

[alexander-jr]

would like to confirm that I'm getting the same bug on the ASUS UX433FN, updating the BIOS to the latest version 309 hasn't helped, out of interest have tried the qubes 4.1 to no avail as well

[marmarek]

There is a discussion about this on xen-devel ML: https://markmail.org/thread/qsnxiknqalo4qoke
Generally it looks as a Xen bug, but there is no consensus yet how to fix it.

The same bug ("MP-BIOS bug: 8254 timer not connected to IO-APIC") occurs to me with Qubes 4.0.3 on an Asus Zenbook UX433F. Looks like the thread linked by @marmarek reports some progress on this issue.

[tobbe0xFF]

Getting a very similar error as everyone else reporting in this thread when trying to install Qubes 4.0.3 from USB on a system with MSI B360M Mortar.
There is a minor differnce in the error message in that after
ENABELING IO_APIC IRQs -> Using old ACK method
it skips right to
------- [ Xen-4.8.5-14.fc25 x86_64 debug=n Not tained 1 ] --------
The rest very similar to screenshot 2/3 from @hs-j

Looking at the thread posted by @marmarek it seems that someone got it working by updating Xen code in a message from March 18. What would it take to include that update with Qubes? Any chance that could make it into Qubes 4.1 or even an earlier service release?

[taxmeifyoucan]

I experience the same issue, XPS 13 7390, Intel i7-10510U. When I try to boot from installation volume, it get stuck at rebooting with similar logs as @hs-j. Is there any closure on this issue, any solutions I can try? Can't wait to run Qubes!