I have noticed since long time ago that using Qubes OS drains laptop battery must faster than using Windows. Machine is hot and fan runs at medium speed constantly. When I looked at Qubes Domains widget, no VM is using more than few percents of CPU time, so I thought it was normal… until now.
It is not new to me that whenever a Windows VM is running, there are always two windows open: One with the Windows startup animation stopped, and the other with the Windows desktop. I have read somewhere that it is the way Windows VM works and there is nothing the user can do about. Kind of accepted reality.
When I took a closer look at what xentop in dom0 is saying, I saw this (irrelevant lines deleted):
NAME STATE CPU(%)
win7 --b--- 3.2
win7 -----r 41.5
Domain-0 -----r 10.4
What supprised me is there are two “win7” names under the NAME column, instead of one. “win7” is the name of Windows VM that has always been shown in Qubes Domains widget only once since the beginning of time.
So, I have three questions to ask:
One, if you use Windows 7 VM, do you experience the same thing? Is this happening only to me?
Two, as Qubes Domains widget shows only one “win7” using 3% of CPU time, that is not consistent with xentop saying there are two “win7” instances, one using about 3% of CPU time and the another using about 41% of CPU time, can it be considered as a bug in Qubes Domains widget?
Three, how to stop (or at least pause) the second “win7” instance showing by xentop as consuming 41.5% of CPU time? Almost half of my CPU time is spent doing nothing and that is not so great. 