High Speed Network Cards with QubesOS 10Gbps+ | Question

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Is anyone here using QubesOS with high speed network cards? I am thinking of 10Gbps -25Gbps speeds. Is this even possible with QubesOS or does the network stack of the VMs reduce the throughput severely (sys-net > sys-firewall > backupVM)?

I want to backup my QubesOS system over the network very fast. My storage server can handle 25Gbps, so I am considering adding a 25Gbps card to my QubesOS system.

Any thoughts on this? Will it work?

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It should work, but you’ll need to have CPU with enough cores and assign more VCPUs to the sys-net/sys-firewall/etc qubes to handle the high bandwidth.

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As Apparatus mentions, it should work. Also read the last post from this 2018 thread:

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Is the virtual NIC not only 1gbps?

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No, for example, the iperf3 speed test between two qubes attached to the same sys-firewall that has 2 VCPUs will show me 3.5 Gbits/s speed with the CPU usage in sys-firewall being the bottleneck.

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Sorry for being afk for so long. Thanks for all the great answers! I really appreciate it. Mellanox cards would also be my preferred way to add networking.

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I agree with you that CPU will most likely be the limiting factor. Is QubesOS networking mostly single-threaded or does it make sense to add more VCPUs? Is it wise to go for more high clocked cores or scale horizontally?