What is "pausing" a qube?

User Support General
1

I checked the manpage for qvm-pause and the qubes-os docs but couldn’t find what is “pausing” in the context of a qube. For example, if I pause my sys-whonix what happens,
1/ to sys-whonix qube? Does that qube lose data?
2/ to my greater system which may utilize sys-whonix qube?

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2

I cant help with Whonix.
If you pause any qube that provides network services then other qubes
that have it set as netvm will lose connectivity.
The paused qube will not generally lose data. If you unpause, then the
downstream qubes will presumably have been attempting to send data and
this wont be reflected in the current network stack. That rights itself.

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3

That’s interesting. Thanks for some words on this.

The reason I mentioned sys-whonix was that I am on a wifi connection that seems to block sys-whonix from completing its Tor routing (the Tor status bar is mid-way completed). So, the sys-whonix is at 10% CPU usage, which impacts my battery usage. So, I just paused that qube, which freed up my CPU and gave my battery a bump in its remaining discharge period.

Thus, I was interested in what “pausing” does, and whether it causes some data loss, etc.

4

Pausing simply stops the CPU for that qube.

5

There was an issue where qubes would stop running or something if they were paused for too long (I haven’t experienced it yet). But for this reason in Qubes 4.1 in the Domains Widget in the tray meny it now says “emergency pause” instead of pause.

So I’d be careful about using this feature too much.

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6
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7

It may have some minor side effects (e.g. “time walks”), but works mostly well on Debian & Fedora qubes (I use it multiple times every day).

8

OK. Thanks for the warning.