Interface freezes after a vm shutdown - Qubes R4.0 - Thinkpad x230

User Support
1

Hello,

I am a new user of Qubes OS R4.0 up to date on a Thinkpad X230.

I have an issue when I shutdown a virual machine by the Qube Manager or by the terminal inside the VM itself (shutdown -h now), the gui freeze and I only can move the mouse.
After that, I have to hold down the power button to turn off my computer.

I don’t know where I have to look to get more informations. I don’t understand where to find informations in /var/log.

Do you have an explanation and / or an idea to help me to solve this issue ?

Thanks.

Julien

2

Hello,

I continue to search and investigate.

The problem occure when I shutdown a specific appvm with 1TB of datas inside.

When I shutdown this appvm by the qubes manager in the GUI or when I use the command qvm-shutdown --all, the GUI freeze and If I use the second tty (ctrl +alt + f2) it doesn’t work anymore. I have to do an hardware shutdown.
I have no specific error in journalctl except this one :
qubes.WindowIconUpdater: personal -> dom0: denied: qrexec-client failed

Is there a way to fix this problem because I think that my datas will be damage after all these hard dirty shutdown…

Thank you for helping me.

Julien

3

You have a qube with 1TB data in private storage?
On an x230?
This seems so far outside the expected use that I’m not surprised your
system is at breaking point.

I do know people who run 1TB or more in private storage, but they use
machines adequate to the task.
Frankly, after the second (maybe the third) freeze, I would be looking
at alternative ways of organizing my data. Insanity is repeating the
same mistakes and expecting different results.

4

Maybe you could look into adding all the extra storage on an external drive and auto-attaching it on boot to the qube in question?

5

Thank you for your response.

I find nothing about storage limitation. Also, I think that it is the usage, separate your digital life into domains, one of them is my personal domain with my familly photos and videos…
X230 have a litlle screen but an Intel i7 and 16 GB of ram with an 2 TB ssd. It’s not so bad for this use I think.

This is not repetitions but investigation :wink:

6

thank you for your tips, I will try that if I find nothing else to solve my issue. :+1:t2:

1 Like
7

Hi @anon42940733. I agree with the suggestions to have the data elsewhere - possibly on a NAS…

In the meantime, I would see if it’s possible to get more insight into what’s going on. For example,

  • Disable any autostart qubes
  • Reboot - only dom0 should be active
  • Open a terminal and do “xentop -f”, then hit “s” 3 times to sort by CPU
  • Open another non-overlapping terminal and do “top”
  • Open the Qube Manager and start your monster qube (which will also start any NetVMs needed), but don’t run any application in it
  • Watch the terminals, and when everything is calm again shutdown your monster qube and in the terminals see what runs/hangs

If this works, you can add further steps. If not, I’m out of ideas. :frowning:

8

Thank you for your answer.

I did what you write.
In xentop I see dom0 and then the appvm personal. When I stop appvm personal, it close disapear from xentop but dom0 use 100% of cpu .

In top I have a kworker that use 97% of cpu.

It works from 3 hours now and don’t stop.

I don’t know why it use so much cpu.

thank you

9

You have a 2TB SSD, and a qube with 1TB in private disk.
Look at the volumes under /dev/qubes-dom0
These are links to volumes under /dev
In particular look at vm-XXX-private and vm-XXX-private...-back
You could mount these in dom0.

Also, run qvm-volume info XXX:private, and look at “size”, “usage” and
“revisions_to_keep”.

1 Like
10

Hello,
thank you for you message.
I have the following property :
revisions_to_keep 1
save_on_stop true
save_on_start false

I have 7 revisions to keep, it’s not logical isn’t it ?
Also, is it possible to set save_on_stop to false ? I don’t understand the purpose of save_on* property.

11

Hello,

I have set save_on_stop to false, remove all lvm Snapshot, set revision_to_keep to 0 in qubes.xml, but after each dirty shutdown I have more than one revision and I still have the bug.

Do I have to create an issue on github or the problem is my use case ?

12

You should almost never have to edit qubes.xml directly.
qvm-volume set qube:private revisions_to_keep 0 will stop saving
revisions.
You should see that any private-xxx-back volumes are gone - although given
the likely state of your system I would check this and make sure you
have sufficient space.

You might find it more reasonable to move the bulk of the data on to a
storage volume that you attach to the qube as you will.

1 Like