After a decade of use, I'm considering moving on from Qubes

General Discussion
21

Huh. Maybe I need to look at that again. It could solve one of my biggest headaches.

Also, it would be nice to have the OPTION of GPU acceleration in dom0, though. Ever try connecting two HD external monitors to Qubes? The system gets starved for resources FAST.

22

GPU accelerationā€™s worked fine for me in dom0 (itā€™s enabled by default if your hardware supports it in the Fedora version dom0 is running). The issue Iā€™ve had with higher resolutions is the dummy driver/display that VMs use to display to dom0.

/usr/bin/qubes-run-xorg handles this. The default max clock cycle is 300Mhz, which limits framerates without recompiling it with a higher speed. Thatā€™s another thing I havenā€™t looked into yet.

/var/log/Xorg.0.log will show what driver youā€™re using. If itā€™s using software rendering then it would be ā€œllvmpipeā€. On modern Intel chips its modesetting.

23

Hmm. Sadly, I guess my system doesnā€™t support SR-IOV. My understanding is that VirtIO would accomplish the same thing at the kernel/hypervisor level? If so, Iā€™d really like to see it become available.

24

One real difference is the thin provisioning of disks. In KVM, there is no thin provisioning; when you create a new VM, its disk is fully allocated. In my case, I have many appvms which could not have existed without it. Their disks sum up to a larger value than the disk capacity.

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25

Sorry, but this blanket statement is false. There are ways and a simple web search shows that RedHat supported thin provisioning since RHEL 6.4, in 2013.

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26

Oh sorry, I should have stated that it was my personal experience. In my experimentation 2-3 years ago on Rocky/Alma linux (RHEL clones), everything went fine until I saw a messaage like thin provisioned volumes were not supported. I had the impression that it was a limitation of KVM, not Red Hat. During that period I remember researching a lot on fixing it without success. If there was any avenue of running thin provisioned KVM, I would probably have found it. But it was not possible by my effort.

I would be more than happy if it is or turns into something that is easily achievable by anyone.