HCL - ASUS P5GC-MX-1333

[Motiv DeCuir]

[Motiv8]

Additional notes:

 - Built this motherboard as a first testbed ( was in my junkbox, LGA775, has built-in Intel video). Unfortunately the board is limited to Core2Duo, 4GB, just uses a spare 256GB sata hdd. Nevertheless this runs Win7Pro-x64 in an HVM, although I recognise it doesn't have the full protection offered by VX-d. I'm a bit of a noob, I just followed the wiki.  The only trap during installation of Win7 was to have to shutdown and restart Qubes a few times to get around the "insuffient memory" error that you sometimes get when starting the HVM. As I said, I'm a noob, couldn't find other solutions to release memory. No issues with installation of Qubes itself or running of lnux VMs, or doing updates.  Win7, once running, thinks its running on the metal, is pretty quick, has access to internet, does everything.like windoze updates, installs firefox, etc.  After I play with this for a while, I'll look at building a real machine with full support for VX-d, 16GB, SSDs, etc.  Also interested in trying Win8 too, but its certainly not clear in the wiki and this forum whether win8 works at all.

On Sunday, December 28, 2014 11:26:19 PM UTC+13, Motiv8 wrote:

[Hakisho Nukama]

Thanks for the additional info.

You might try in dom0 [0]:
[root@dom0 ~]# echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

This has helped me, when I had set ZFS not limited to 512MB and tried to
start a new VM.
Starting a VM ask for a big bunch of memory, and the system doesn't
release the memory occupied by the zfs_arc fast enough.

Best Regards,
Hakisho Nukama

[0] https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt

[Motiv8]

Will try that, thanks.
Some more info which might encourage the novices who are interested in the Win7 HVM.  Ran CPU-Z.  Sees the CPU but some things are different of course.  The Motherboard is seen as 'HVM domU', the chipset as Intel i440FX (Rev 02), Southbridge as Intel 82371SB (PIIX3), Bios Brand as Xen, Version 4.1.6.1, it reports the memory as the value assigned in the HVM, and in the device manager, the display adapter as a 'standard VGA graphic adapter', and the two disc drives, as QEMU, matching the size of the two I configured in the HVM.  Hibernation also works. I haven't tried any performance benchmarks.

[Marek Marczykowski-Górecki]

Also sometimes "kded" process leaks memory, you can simply kill it and
restart from konsole.

--
Best Regards,
Marek Marczykowski-Górecki
Invisible Things Lab
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?

[Rafał Wojdyła]

On 2014-12-29 00:38, Marek Marczykowski-Górecki wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 28, 2014 at 10:38:08PM +0000, Hakisho Nukama wrote:
>> On Sun, Dec 28, 2014 at 8:13 PM, Motiv8 <motiv8...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Additional notes:
>>>
>>> - Built this motherboard as a first testbed ( was in my junkbox, LGA775,
>>> has built-in Intel video). Unfortunately the board is limited to Core2Duo,
>>> 4GB, just uses a spare 256GB sata hdd. Nevertheless this runs Win7Pro-x64 in
>>> an HVM, although I recognise it doesn't have the full protection offered by
>>> VX-d. I'm a bit of a noob, I just followed the wiki. The only trap during
>>> installation of Win7 was to have to shutdown and restart Qubes a few times
>>> to get around the "insuffient memory" error that you sometimes get when
>>> starting the HVM. As I said, I'm a noob, couldn't find other solutions to
>>> release memory. No issues with installation of Qubes itself or running of
>>> lnux VMs, or doing updates. Win7, once running, thinks its running on the
>>> metal, is pretty quick, has access to internet, does everything.like windoze
>>> updates, installs firefox, etc. After I play with this for a while, I'll
>>> look at building a real machine with full support for VX-d, 16GB, SSDs, etc.
>>> Also interested in trying Win8 too, but its certainly not clear in the wiki
>>> and this forum whether win8 works at all.
>>>

Win8 is not supported by Qubes Tools yet. You can try to install it
without them but someome earlier wrote that there were problems with that.

>>> On Sunday, December 28, 2014 11:26:19 PM UTC+13, Motiv8 wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>
>> Thanks for the additional info.
>>
>> You might try in dom0 [0]:
>> [root@dom0 ~]# echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
>>
>> This has helped me, when I had set ZFS not limited to 512MB and tried to
>> start a new VM.
>> Starting a VM ask for a big bunch of memory, and the system doesn't
>> release the memory occupied by the zfs_arc fast enough.
>
> Also sometimes "kded" process leaks memory, you can simply kill it and
> restart from konsole.
>

--

Rafał Wojdyła
Qubes Tools for Windows developer