Librem 13 laptop initial report, issues to fix

[Eric McCorkle]

Hello all,

I have obtained one of the Librem 13 laptops (https://www.crowdsupply.com/purism/librem-13), and have begun the process is setting up FreeBSD on it.  Here is an initial report of my findings, including the issues I've had.  Since the hardware was chosen for things like open specifications, available for are source, etc, I'm optimistic about getting all these addressed.


The following devices Just Work(tm):

* EFI boot/loader (with a pure ZFS system)
* SD card reader
* Realtek Ethernet (re)
* SMBus (ichsmb)
* coretemp and cpufreq
* Intel HDA (speaker-test works with speakers and headphone jack, haven't tested recording yet)
* Hard drive and SSD (I have ZFS with main storage on the drive, and swap, ZFS cache, and a small intent log on the SSD)
* USB ports
* Bluetooth (though I seem to have disabled it in the latest kernel config by accident)
* The keyboard fn keys actually work fine, which is the first time I've seen that.

This laptop also features hard-disconnect switches for the camera (a USB device).  I've tested booting with them in various configuration, as well as flipping them on/off.  FreeBSD seems to handle this fairly well, however it complains loudly about timeouts before disconnecting the bus.  I wonder if there might me some setting to say "treat this bus as a hot-pluggable peripheral"

I tried Jean-Sebastian's Intel KMS patch, but it doesn't support the broadwell cards.


I have the following issues:

* Atheros 9462 wireless card is detected, but the radio doesn't seem to work.  pciconf reports a few errors: receiver error, bad tlp, bad dllp.  Just to rule something like a bad solder, I'm going to try booting up a Linux memstick and see what happens.

* Blank screen on resume, everything else is fine.  This resembles an issue I had with a Lenovo.  I did some initial poking around, and acpi debugging traces reveal some execution errors during the resume process.  I will get a more complete report to post to freebsd-acpi.

* Sporadic boot-hang, USB timeouts.  This seems to be dependent on kernel configuration.  It happens for some configs, not for others, and turning on verbose boot seems to stop it.  Based on this, I strongly suspect a timing-related bug somewhere in the boot process.

* VESA weirdness with X.  Running X with the VESA driver starts and displays fine, but when you switch back to a terminal, a few pixels around the border of the X screen still show up in the terminal.  Also, when shutting down X, it hangs and the screen becomes unresponsive.  This seemingly implicates the vga bios; fortunately, this can probably be fixed due to the nature of the Librem project.


The blank screen on suspend is probably the most critical, with the Atheros card issue being a close second.  If anyone has suggestions about where to look/how to diagnose, I'd certainly appreciate them.  I will also be in contact with the Librem developers after I do more diagnosis.


Additionally, there are some things I want to look in to once everything is working:

* The laptop bios allows for custom signing keys to be configured.  This sets the stage for a secure boot process.

* See if anything can be done (or needs to be done) in order to better support the hard-off switches.  They seem to work (for the camera/mic; can't tell yet about the wireless), but complain to dmesg about timeouts when switched off.  See if some config exists/can be added to make them detachable.