Been using XMRig to mine my own Monero for a few years now. My machine is still doing pretty good for what it is. I don’t see the MSI MPG 570S Max Edge Wifi (MS-7D53) in the HCL, but I’m willing to give Qubes-OS a try if:
I can continue using the XMRig, P2Pool, and Official MoneroGUI Wallet
MSR registers will be passed to a Debian Template
Steam gaming (GTA V, RDR2, and CyberPunk 2077 are my faves) is doable
I’m a long-time Debian user, but due to my desire to get into cybersecurity, and because Qubes-OS is Polish and I’m in Europe, I’m very much interested in this project. I only have this one machine, though. It’s acting as a mediacenter PC, if you will.
Specs:
MSI MPG 570S Max Edge Wifi motherboard
AMD 5950X 16-core CPU
64GB G.Skill DDR4 RAM
1TB NVME Samsung 980 PRO SSD
AMD RX 580 Radeon GPU (not used for mining Monero)
I’d really like to avoid a dual-boot setup if I can avoid it. Hoping to make Qubes-OS my daily driver.
Dunno about HCL but for gaming you need second gfx card as 5950X have no igpu.
One gpu is needed for system desktop and second to pass thru to gaming vm.
As for MSR, vm’s uses virtual cpu’s so probably no.
There are some xen commands to check MSR states according to Xen docs, but it can be done in dom0 only. You probably could make script that reads it and send it to vm. But that’s my speculation.
There is no reason it would be impossible. The above replies indicate it will be more expensive but that doesn’t mean you should avoid it.
The question is more whether the motherboard/bios/whatever would prevent Qubes from being used.
I recently started using Qubes on a daily driver laptop and it has been pleasant for the most part. Segregating tasks into their own Qubes makes a lot of sense.
I don’t know about (2), MSR registers, but if I find out I will post here.
It seems the simplest thing to do with regard to MSR is run wrmsr in dom0 manually before starting the miner in its own qube. That, of course, requires the package that can run that command in dom0, and therefore is worse than not having the package in dom0. But looking at the situation overall, you are not worse off running qubes on this machine and running that wrmsr command in dom0 than not running qubes at all. Saying you shouldn’t run qubes in this situation is kind of like saying (a stretch, I know) you shouldn’t configure https with weak cipher suites and you’re better off keeping the http status quo. Surely a weakened qubes install is better than no qubes, right?