Kali disp vm crashes about 50% of the time after about 1 minute

User Support
1

Hi,

From the Q menu, when I try to start xterm on a new Kali disposable VM (starting a dispXXXX):

  • about 50% of the time (I did not measure precisely), things go as expected
  • about 50% of the time, xterm does not open and Qubes notifies me after about 1 minute that dispXXXX has shutdown.

Additional info:

  • My Qubes release is 4.1.1
  • I have never seen this problem so far when starting a dispVM based on Debian nor Whonix

Any idea on how to solve this?

Thank you!

2

Extend qrexec_timeout with qvm-prefs

3

Thanks for your reply, @unman !

In dom0, I changed:

[user@dom0 ~]$ qvm-prefs kali-dvm qrexec_timeout 120
[user@dom0 ~]$ qvm-prefs kali-dvm qrexec_timeout
120
[user@dom0 ~]$

Then I tried 5 times to start xterm in a new kali-based dispXXXX as described in my initial post:

  • 1 time out of 5, Xterm opened and I was able to work in my new dispXXXX

  • 4 times out of 5, Xterm did not pop up and the dispXXXX shut down after 2 minutes. Maybe my initial assessment of 50% was too optimistic.

    I was able to get an Xterm window by going to Q menu → right-click on dispXXXX → Run Command in Qube → I typed “Xtem”. But that window closed when the VM shut down.

    I guess increasing qrexec_timeout to 3600 might give me a dispXXXX for one hour but I do not want my VMs to shutdown unexpectedly (except if I constantly look at the clock) when I work.

Any idea on how to move forward?
Many thanks!

4

I would set it at the higher timeout, and use that time to see what is
happening.
There may be some reason for slow start which you can fix.

5

Not sure I understand what you mean with “slow start”. Either there is no problem or xterm does not start at all. In the latter case, I can start an xterm window through the Q menu as described above, though, which then opens immediately.

That is precisely my question with this post since I don’t know how to do that:

  • In Qubes (since I assume a qrexec problem is related to Qubes), where are the logs I should look at?
  • Is there some documentation explaining qrexec that would help me understand and solve my problem?

Thank you for your help.