Pools and varlibqubes in Qubes-OS 4.3

rustybird · October 2, 2025, 10:46am

For LVM, it’s planned to no longer create a varlibqubes pool at all:

Deprecate 'file' storage driver in R4.1, remove in R5.0

opened 02:15AM - 12 Feb 21 UTC

C: core release notes P: default C: storage

**Qubes OS version (if applicable)** R4.1 **Affected component(s) or fun…ctionality (if applicable)** core **Brief summary** 1. Add some verbose notification about using deprecated storage driver in R4.1. I think this can be a notification at the system startup (can be added to the code of one of the widgets, for example qui-updates one). Also, add a warning when creating new "file" pool. Maybe also when listing storage pools? 2. Do not create "file" pool automatically during system installation. But do create file-reflink for `/var/lib/qubes` directory, for compatible filesystems. 3. Document migration off the file driver (either to file-reflink or to lvm), and link to it from release notes and the notification. In-place migration is preferred if possible, otherwise document reinstall method. **Additional context** The file storage driver is very inefficient and also some features are impossible to achieve using its old architecture (it simulates CoW volumes using dm-snapshot, which limits snapshots levels to 1). Example issues caused by its inferior features: - #4324 - #6329 - #3255

If you like, check out the Secondary storage documentation. Here’s a not yet published version which contains some fixes for Btrfs: https://github.com/rustybird/qubes-doc/blob/secondary-storage-btrfs-fixes/user/advanced-topics/secondary-storage.rst