QOS requires a minimum of 6gb RAM. I just tried installing QOS on a spare Thinkpad T61 w/3gb RAM. I could easily go to 4gb but apparently that would make no difference. The error was “X startup failed, aborting installation”
This seems to kill off any possibilty to use 2008 and older Thinkpads – precisely those that pre-date the Intel Management Engine. IIUC, the only way to run Qubes on non-spychip hardware is on a ~2008 desktop that can do ~16gb or so RAM.
I wonder why it’s so fat. Around 5 yrs ago, my T61 ran Debian just fine on 2gb RAM. I maxed it out to 4gb merely because I came across some cheap memory. I did not notice much difference. Today I still run Debian on a T61 w/4gb ram. I can open ~30+ tabs without issue. I can also run virtualbox on that with tinyXP and tiny7 without too much struggle.
I have some dumpster-harvested PCs that are newer, with spychips. These are just for tinkering and they are airgapped. I could put QOS on them but it’s somewhat purpose-defeating to run QOS on an airgapped box.
The IBM Power 9 chip is a modern day spychip-free architecture… but it’s costly server grade stuff.
I heard these emerging RISC-V things are spychip-free. Perhaps QOS would make sense on those… but IIUC they are very new and likely not ready for prime time yet.
Well, the recommended minimum - what you can actually use in practice - is more like 16 GB
Why so ‘fat’? you ask… because it’s technically a xen hypervisor runnig 6+ virtual machine at the same time. Not even comperable with a pure debian. But this is all described in the FAQ
Because from the start it runs like 5-6 computers, where especially one, dom0 need 2gb at start and rest 4 need ~2gb in total and that’s minimal for them to run.
What CPU are you using ? My basic understanding is Penryn is latest CPU family that it can run and that doesn’t do vt-x and vt-d. Are you just running qubes without that ?
But I don’t know about the vt-x/d nuances. I recall that the BIOS of my main Penryn one has a virualization toggle. When I toggle it on, virtualbox reports some kind of error so I have to configure vbox vms to not use it. Not sure what that’s about… perhaps a vbox defect.
I recently got annoyed when Argos Translate failed to run on one of my t61 laptops, which I switched to after the fan failed in my main one. It turns out the lack of SSE4 instructions was the culprit. Now that you have inspired me to look at these Merom / Penryn differences, that’s a significant difference… the Penryn ones have SSE4.
Strangley, some of the t61 laptops show an Intel Management Engline banner upon boot and some do not. Yet my main Penyrn one has no IME, so I guess not all Penryns are equal. Perhaps IME was introduced mid-Penryn.
I think I read somewhere that the t61 can be hacked to run 8gb of RAM, unofficially, which would meet the Qubes min. But I guess I should forget about that because if vt-d is needed, then Qubes cannot run on it anyway.
