USB4 Dock connection prevents framework laptop booting Fedora Atomic COSMIC

[p-sims]

I think this is the right place, as I can't get grub version number out of terminal but I can type bootc --version and get:

bootc 1.14.1

I've report this issue here, but I actually think part of it might relate to bootloader (as it's before ostree selection screen), so I wanted to flag here.

To Reproduce Not booting with USB4 dock connected

Steps to reproduce:

1. Connect USB4 Dock (tested with Lenovo ThinkPad V1003 40B0) to Framework 13 laptop
2. Press power button

The power light comes on, but screen remains black. If you press power button again, power like goes out. If you unplug USB4 Dock, and then press power button in and then plug USB4 in after ostree screen shows, all is fine.

Expected behavior

Computer boots

System & Versions:

Notes:

This issues mean than you can't reboot with laptop lid closed and monitors connected via external dock. As you just end up with black screen indefinitely. You can only reboot with laptop disconnect from dock.

If this isn't he right place to report this sorry, and please point me in the right direction.

[jeckersb]

I've experienced something similar to this, although not exactly what you describe but it could be related so I'll explain.

For me, the problem was due to LUKS encryption combined with thunderbolt auth (the dock you listed above seems to be a thunderbolt dock). Because thunderbolt is able to DMA directly to PCIe it is a security risk and needs to be explicitly authorized so that plugging into a rogue thunderbolt device doesn't compromise your system. Normally you only need to do this auth once and then it stores it on the disk and then re-uses it to reauth the device on future boots. However there's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem when you have the laptop closed, because the system needs to display the LUKS passphrase screen on the external monitor, and you need to use the external keyboard in order to input said passphrase. But because you don't have the disk unlocked yet, the system can't see the previous thunderbolt authentication so the dock cannot be connected at this part of the boot process.

Initially I worked around this by adding a drop-in udev rule added to the initrd which authorized my particular thunderbolt dock by matching its UUID. That would cause the dock to auth very early in the boot process and then the monitor would come on and I could enter the passphrase with the external keyboard.

After some time what I ended up doing instead is enrolling the TPM with LUKS, which means the system automatically unlocks the volume without needing a passphrase and then once it gets the root disk mounted it can re-read the prior thunderbolt auth and enable the device during boot as expected.