Qubes 4 RC5 on a Thinkpad F430: HCL and some observations

[nortiu...@gmail.com]

(I originally posted this via gmane, but it hasn't shown up so far)

Hi, all,

I've spent a bunch of time in the last day or two getting RC5 running on my daily driver, a Thinkpad 430 with 16 GB of memory and a 1 TB SSD. It normally runs 3.2, so I got a new WD SSD for playing with 4.0.

First observation: It's pretty slick overall. Kudos to the ITL team for another winner. If I ever visit Poland I'll be sure to budget for quite a lot of beer, because I owe you folks.

There are a few curiosities:

1. In dom0, typing

qvm-run -a myqube xterm

blocks the dom0 terminal till I close the xterm (or whatever other program). I much preferred the 3.2 behaviour, in which the dom0 prompt returned right away. It's inelegant to keep going ctl-C in dom0, and I don't like the setsid alternative since I don't know how much cruft I'm accumulating that way.

2. DispVMs based on AppVMs seem to crash on startup a lot. As an engineer I really like the ability to run old apps on archival VMs without corrupting the archives, but on my box startup is a bit flaky. Once they're properly running I haven't seen an issue so far.

3. It would be nice if the DispVM frame gave some indication what template or AppVM it was based on. [disp xxxy] is a commendably unique identifier, but there's a lot of space on the window frame, so "workDVMxxxy" or "personalDVMzzzx" would be pretty useful. (I usually have several AppVMs going at once.)

4. (probably most important) Dom0 lies through its teeth about the disk usage. I gather you folks have hidden the VMs' guts so you can't just poke around /var/lib/qubes anymore, but in the process you've completely confused the only tools we mortals have left to manage disk space: domo's du and df commands.

On a 1T SSD, I restored over 450G worth of AppVMs, but dom0's df returns:

Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs 1995976 0 1995976 0% /dev
tmpfs 2009828 0 2009828 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs 2009828 1612 2008216 1% /run
tmpfs 2009828 0 2009828 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mapper/qubes_dom0-root 935037724 3866076 883604596 1% /
tmpfs 2009828 8 2009820 1% /tmp
xenstore 2009828 416 2009412 1% /var/lib/xenstored
/dev/sda1 999320 79676 850832 9% /boot
tmpfs 401964 8 401956 1% /run/user/1000

You'd never know that the disk is actually half full or a little more. I have no idea how to manage my disk space on Qubes 4.0.

Thanks again

BillW

---
layout:
'hcl'
type:
'notebook'
hvm:
'yes'
iommu:
'yes'
slat:
'yes'
tpm:
''
remap:
'yes'
brand: |
LENOVO
model: |
2349S7W
bios: |
G1ET73WW (2.09 )
cpu: |
Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2520M CPU @ 2.50GHz
cpu-short: |
FIXME
chipset: |
Intel Corporation 2nd Generation Core Processor Family DRAM Controller [8086:0104] (rev 09)
chipset-short: |
FIXME
gpu: |
Intel Corporation 2nd Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:0126] (rev 09) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
gpu-short: |
FIXME
network: |
Intel Corporation 82579LM Gigabit Network Connection (Lewisville) (rev 04)
Intel Corporation Centrino Wireless-N 2200 (rev c4)
memory: |
16073
scsi: |
WDC WDS100T2B0A- Rev: 30WD
DVD ROM DDU7740H Rev: 1RS0
usb: |
3
versions:

- works:
'FIXME:yes|no|partial'
qubes: |
R4.0
xen: |
4.8.3
kernel: |
4.14.18-1
remark: |
FIXME
credit: |
FIXAUTHOR
link: |
FIXLINK

---