Vm-pool storage

User Support General
1

I’m still a qube-noob, so forgive me ahead of time for asking a potentially obvious question, but:

I’ve read literally for hours across multiple websites to find an answer to this (including Qubes’ official documentation), and this is stumping me.

How the heck do I expand the vm-pool?

I dedicated 500 gigs to Qubes, yet I’m only getting about 90 gigs in my vm-pool, with no clear method of expanding it. I’m also assuming that it could be a security risk to place things outside of that region, so I’d obviously like to avoid that.

Thank all of you for your time! I really love the philosophy of Qubes, and I really hope to understand it more thoroughly.

2

I assume you are using the default which uses thin pools so it should allocate more when needed automatically. Dom0 pool is separated so it can’t get full and grind the machine to a standstill.

The fact that is shows only 90gb is odd. When I do an install everything left over is put in the main pool. Where is the other 400 gb going ?

If needed I believe you’d use lvextend command. I did that when I cloned to a larger drive

3

Thank you for your rapid response. I did consider that it might expand as needed, but again, I could never find literature that made that clear.

So, this is what I see on my Qubes Disk Space Monitor:

Total Disk Usage
6.5%

Volumes
linux-kernel

varlibqubes
data 1.2% 5.7 GiB/489.2 GiB

vm-pool
data 35.6% 32 GiB/89.8 GiB
metadata 30.3%

4

Would you please inform us on the output of the below commands:

qvm-pool list
qvm-pool info vm-pool

Also this:

qubes-prefs | grep pool
5

That looks flipped.

Vm-pool should have 400gb space
Varlibqubes is dom0 and will rarely need more than 20gb ever

Also I thought you gave qubes 500gb but those two thin pools are 580GiB combined.

6

pool list

Name Driver
varlibqubes file
linux-kernel linux-kernel
vm-pool lvm_thin

info
name vmpool
driver lvm_thin
ephemeral_volatile False
rev-to-keep 2
size 96431243264
thin-pool vm-pool
usage 34377738223
vol-group qubes_dom0

grep

default_pool - vm-pool
defailt_pool_kernel - linux-kernel
default_pool_private D vm-pool
default_pool_root D vm-pool
default_pool_volatile D vm-pool

7

Maybe I added more. I’ve installed Qubes three times in a row now.

But why do you think it’d be flipped?

8

I’ve done a lot of installs and never experienced this. Do you format/wipe the drive before installing second and third time ? You want to start clean

9

Yeah, the drive is clean. I’m using 100 gigs for Fedora, and 500 or so for Qubes, and I’ve got about 400 gigs that are completely empty.

10

One option to get around this is to use advanced/custom install option of btrfs. Then there are no thin pools

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11

I’ll be installing Qubes a fourth time tomorrow on another PC. On that one, I’ll have to first wipe Windows. But first I’m going to redownload the iso, reverify it, and then install.

Would using btrfs open up vulnerabilities?

12

It’s weird that qubes is using 580+ gib in the two pools if you have the partitions like that ?

13

It is a supported option in the installer from Qubes so I take it they think it is as secure as lvm. It’s just a different filesystem format

14

True.

So your opinion is that the 89 GiB it’s showing me should, in fact, expand as needed?

Or do you immediately see most of your drive space (in vm-pool) available upon installation?

15

I don’t have any experience with dual boot, that might be causing an issue. Lots of people dual boot, perhaps they will comment

16

No I don’t think it will auto expand because there is no free space (varlibqubes has it). I believe you’d need to shrink what varlibqubes has and then give the free space to vm-pool with lvextend.

I’d just do a fresh install vs messing around with that

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17

Yes. The above is the correct & proper way.

Just keep backups if you need them.

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18

I’ve tried to move all that around with Gparted via my Fedora partition, but I wasn’t exactly sure what should and shouldn’t be moved based on the labels provided lol.

But okay, I’ll try the fresh install, and let you know how it went tomorrow.

Though I will say before I go that it also did this to me on my second install. (I didn’t pay attention to the Disk Space Monitor on the first install.) The second time I devoted about 250 gigs, and vm-pool only showed about 45 gigs available.

So for some reason, it’s providing me less than 20% of what I give it each time.

19

Qubes is much more finicky than a vanilla Linux distro. If you can, try a single boot install to get a feel for it before doing dual boot. When I need that, I install on two separate ssds. But that has more security issues

Good luck :crossed_fingers:

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20

Okay, so upon my 4th install, everything seems just fine. For the record, I did decide to keep my Fedora dual-boot, but before I installed I completely wiped and reformatted the rest of my entire drive as ext4 just in case.

Now my Disk Monitor looks like it should:

varlibqubes 5.7 GiB/19.5 GiB

vm-pool 25.5 GiB/729.8 GiB

Thank everyone for your quick and helpful responses! That just makes me love this community even more!

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