Installing Qubes OS on Two NVMe SSDs with RAID 0 Configuration

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1

I’m planning to install Qubes OS on a system with two NVMe SSDs configured in RAID 0. I’d like guidance on how to set this up correctly. Can anyone please guide me how to do so?

I’ve created RAID partition /dev/md0 using following command:

mdadm --create --verbose --level=0 --raid-devices=2 /dev/md0 /dev/nvme0n1 /dev/nvme1n1

but the installer gui is not displaying the drives now.

Update: After recreating raid 0 partition now anaconda is crashing on refreshing the disk and giving this error and then the system reboot:

pyanaconda.modules.common.errors.general.AnacondaError: failed to add parent md0 of device luks

2

After reviewing Qubes Issues on GitHub, it appears that Qubes OS currently doesn’t support a RAID 0 setup, and it seems it won’t be supported in version 4.3 either.

Too bad! I was really looking forward to using Qubes on a RAID 0 array.

3

RAID-0 looks like it’s easy to set up for the semi-automatic Btrfs installation layout:

4

The GUI-based RAID creation utility available in the Fedora installer is not present in the Qubes OS installer. Additionally, when I attempt to create RAID drives using the virtual console and then load them in the GUI, the Anaconda installer crashes, causing the system to reboot. Therefore, the setup described in the linked guide does not work for Qubes OS.

5

Using RAID0 on Qubes is quite simple using BTRFS. Select the two drives when installing Qubes, select “Custom”, and follow the instructions.

I setup RAID0 on my system with two NVMe drives with no issue. Hoped for noticeable quicker speed, but in normal use it doesn’t feel any faster.

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6

It is present in the R4.2.4 installer. Make sure you don’t forget the first step:

For RAID-0, the total capacity will be (number of drives) * (size of the smallest drive) although Btrfs would support using the full capacity, because Anaconda will create small partitions even if “Size policy: As large as possible” is selected. (I haven’t tried the R4.3 installer, maybe it’s fixed there?) The full capacity can still be used by selecting “RAID Level: Single”, which however won’t do striping so performance should be a bit lower than for RAID-0.

At least for the default “Single”, it’s also possible to install with just one drive and add more drives later.

7

I read in another post that Qubes OS has poorer performance with Btrfs compared to ext4.

Given that you mentioned RAID 0 didn’t significantly improve performance, could this be related to Btrfs’s performance issues?

Is a RAID 0 configuration in Qubes OS only possible with Btrfs, or can it be configured with ext4?

8

Maximum Gen4x4 throughput is 8Gb/s and Gen5x4 is 16Gb/s, but when transferring MBs in normal use it’s comparing a fraction of a second to a smaller fraction of a second. If you normally work with GBs to TBs throughput I’d recommend another OS than Qubes (that’s what I do for that type of work). And I prefer XFS as it is the quickest in that specific case.