Hi,
What is the way to run non-x86 OS/software “the Qubes way”?
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Since non one participated in this discussion.
I believe there is no proper way for non-x86 qubes. QEMU emulation of ARM, Risc-V and others is not possible at the moment. I am not sure about nested virtualisation. I believe it is not available. Anyone requiring QEMU emulation of non-x86 targets would better use a Distro with KVM support. This is very sad as while Qubes provides lot’s of features which makes it very appealing to embedded developers, it lacks non-x86 QEMU emulation (or at least I am not aware of it).
Since non one participated in this discussion.
I appreciate your attention.
QEMU emulation of ARM, Risc-V and others is not possible at the moment.
Why?
Anyone requiring QEMU emulation of non-x86 targets would better use a Distro with KVM support.
Is it possible to do inside a qube running that distro?
I believe qubes uses a modified version of QEMU. Trying to install virt-manager or other parts of qemu might break everything. I am not 100% sure about this. Last time I tried, some serious packages where to be replaced. So I cancelled the operation.
This is the nested virtualisation I wrote about in the previous post. There is a long thread on forum about it. It is disabled b y default at the moment.
This is the nested virtualisation I wrote about in the previous post. There is a long thread on forum about it.
Thanks. I will have a look.
It is disabled b y default at the moment.
Why? And is there a way to enable it (with what possible negative consequences)?
It is explained in details in many posts in that forum thread as well as the linked Issues on Github.
The short answer is that nested virtualisation was never a priority for Citrix. And lesser a priority for Qubes OS project. And nested Virtualisation+Emulation of other architectures is something very few people would need. So we are talking about the smallest of the smallest of the smallest group of users.
I believe even Qubes OS project does not use Xen on their OpenQA servers to test Installer ISOs of next versions of Qubes OS (since it requires nested virtualisation). openSUSE and KVM is used there (I might be wrong).
Others have suggested workarounds to enable it. I personally never tested it. You will need something like this to do the non-x86 emulation:
Actual x86 Hardware → Qubes OS + Xen with nested virtualisation enabled → HVM with KVM+QEMU+Emulator → Emulated VM
Theoretically this would work with too much overhead and possible bugs.
Thanks for this info.
Quite unfortunate situation.