I’m wondering what CPU, Memory, or performance to use for Qubes OS comfortably. Looking at the official website, I thought that there was little information, and even the specifications according to the official website were quite slow. There are various discussions, so I would like to summarize them in this thread. Here are some specs I need and some that I’m wondering about. Please cooperate if you like.
Absolutely necessary.
Intel VT-x
Intel VT-d
64-bit processor
Questions
RAM Memory
How mouch
The number of RAM was 8GB and it was very slow. Is it really necessary to have 32GB or more?
Memory Types
Which is faster, DDR3 or DDR4? Or does it change much either way? For example, does DDR4-2133 and DDR3-1600 change that much?
SSD
Can any type of SSD be used?
CPU
Cores
Does 4 cores work as fast as normal Linux? Or do need 6 cores?
Processor Base Frequency
Is 2.50-2.70 GHz sufficient?
Intel Hyper-Threading Technology
Is this a hit? If necessary, how different is it with or without this?
EPT
Will VT-x be better with this? Or does it change much?
You’re asking the wrong questions - or perhaps you havent asked the
right question to start with. That question is “What do you want to do with Qubes?”, or perhaps,
“What is important to you in using Qubes”?", and a second
question, “What is your budget?”
Example, I’m currently working on an i5 i2.5GHz x220 with 12GB RAM. I have 13
qubes running now. The only performance hit I see between qubes is when I’m
compiling: nothing new there.
I have hyper-threading turned off, DDR3 and the fastest SSD I could get.
How much RAM should I allocate to each of sys-net, sys-firewall, sys-whonix, whonix-workstation, and KeePass VM to start them at the same time and use Whonix comfortably? Also, if I use QubesOS on my desktop, can I install and use it using a USB-connected keyboard?
I run qubes on my desktop PC with USB mouse and keyboard.
You wount be able to create sys-usb during install because your using the usb keyboard at that time so its attached to dom0 also after install.
This may or may not be a concerne for you.
I went ahead and created sys-usb after the innstalation following this guide:
Be very carefull though, if you dont read trough it properly you’ll loose all USB input devices, I managed to do that at my first try
You shouldn’t try to manage memory manually. Qubes does it automatically for you. To run all of those VMs simultaneously should not require much memory. My guess is that 8GB would be fine. However, since you mentioned that 8GB felt like too little for you, I think 16GB would be plenty.
I actually decided to allocate them all manually, because I want to always know how much memory I still have. At some point, when I allocated too few memory, those qubes worked extremely slowly and unreliably. Currently everything works very well and here are the RAM sizes:
