RAM for Qubes OS

[jeanpie...@gmail.com]

Hi there,

I have a Xiaomi Air Notebook 12.5":

- Intel Core m3-6Y30 Dual Core 0.9GHz, Up to 2.2GHz
- 12.5 inch IPS Screen with 1920 x 1080 Resolution
- 4GB DDR3 RAM for Advanced Multitasking
- 128GB SSD Storage Capacity

(http://www.gearbest.com/laptops/pp_416105.html)

I wonder if 4GB of RAM is enough to run Qubes OS.
I know that 4GB is the minimum required nevertheless I won't install Qubes on it if I can't open 2 AppVM at the same time or if the laptop is very slow.

Thank you,

Feedbacks appreciated if someone alreday installed Qubes on the Xiaomi :)

[cooloutac]

it will run fine but whether or not you can run 2 appvm at same time depends what you do in them? you have

two appvms with 40 firefox tabs open? prolly not lol. I have 6gb and I can run 3 appvm and 3 sysvms but do run into slowdowns if using too much ram.

You can run the live usb just to see how qubes runs on your system. https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/live-usb/

[cooloutac]

you can tell when qubes starts using too much ram if dom0 ram keeps getting lower.

[jeanpie...@gmail.com]

So 4 GB is fine to run 2/3 light VM ?

[cooloutac]

I would say 2 light vm. depending onhow light. but why not test it out for yourself.

[Vít Šesták]

My quick guess is that you need 2GiB more RAM with Qubes0S than with, say, Ubuntu. Reasoning:

a. Experience: 6GiB with Ubuntu was somewhat usable, but I had to close all apps I was not using at the time and even with this, I got some swapping times. With 8GiB, it was much better. With QubesOS, I got similar experience for 8GiB (swapping times) and 10GiB (good experience). But please note that my experience with 10GiB RAM is quite short: I have used it few days because of a faulty RAM module. (10GiB was actually a temporary downgrade from 16GiB.)

b. Calculation: By default, dom0 takes at least 1GiB RAM. Both sys-net and sys-firewall and sys-usb can be configured for 200 or 300 MiB. Plus some overhead.

Note that Qubes 4 will probably add about 50MiB overhead for each VM except HVMs (the overhead is alreasy there) and dom0 (no need for stubdom).

On the other hand, you can make some further modifications that same some RAM.

* If you don't need USB for anything but keyboard and mouse (or touchpad or something similar), you can get rid of sys-usb.
* You might merge sys-net and sys-firewall in one VM. Yes, some will note that this is generally a bad idea. While I agree it reduces some benefits of Qubes, merging sys-net with sys-firewall should not make it worse than conventional distributions.
* You might try MirageOS-based firewall to reduce its footprint. But please note that this is experimental today.

Also note that QubesOS is not designed for swapping. All AppVMs have 1GiB swap and you can theoretically add more, but memory balancing does not work well if swap is used heavily.

I would say that you will be able to run Qubes with 4GiB RAM if your requirements are pretty low. It might be worth trying. But I would not recommend any laptop with non-upgradable 4GiB RAM as a new hardware for QubesOS.

Regards,
Vít Šesták 'v6ak'

[jeanpie...@gmail.com]

Thank for your answer, it's a shame there no ultrabooks allowing RAM upgrade :(