[qubes-users] Intel Optane?

Mailing Lists qubes-users
1

I am likely to buy a machine soon for Qubes. One candidate would come
with 32G of optane & 512G PCIe SSD. I'm seeking advice on using optane
with Qubes.

Searching for optane on the Xen site gives no hits, a general search
for "qubes optane" gives a few but none that seem remarkably helpful.
"linux optane" gives a lot & I'm still working through them.

I'm not sure using the optane as a cache will work with Xen, or that
the payoff from putting cache in front of an SSD will be worthwhile.
Hence I'm inclined to just use the optane device as a fast boot drive,
which various sites say is possible. I'd put Xen, Qubes & likely Dom0
files there & everything else on the 512G device.

Is 32G enough for that? du -h on my current Kubuntu system shows 29G
for / and 18G of that is my home directory (which on the new system
will not be on the root drive) so it looks to me like it should be
fine. But how big is Qubes, assuming all VMs except perhaps Dom0 are
on a separate drive?

2

Sandy Harris:

Is 32G enough for that? du -h on my current Kubuntu system shows 29G
for / and 18G of that is my home directory (which on the new system
will not be on the root drive) so it looks to me like it should be
fine. But how big is Qubes, assuming all VMs except perhaps Dom0 are
on a separate drive?

qubes_dom0_root is ~9GB on my system with a mostly empty ~. That does
not take into account the base templates, so figure +2GB for each
(Fedora, Debian, Whonix-WS, Whonix-GW) depending which you choose to
install. You can relocate or add them later to secondary storage to keep
the 32GB reserved for only Qubes, assuming Optane as a drive is Xen
compatible.