New qubes user question/issue: firewall VM consuming unexpected amount of RAM

[Jane Jok]

Hello!
I'm new to Qubes, but I did a fair stab at reading the docs and googling for stuff about firewall-vm

My question is thus:
is it normal for Firewall VM consume 1.5-1.8 GB RAM (after clean install, this is my first startup) ?

is there a way to reduce RAM consumption?
 (I have just 4 GB ram on this box, and spending 1.5 GB on nothing but a firewall is a bit... unpleasant)

[J. Eppler]

Hello,

all VM's in Qubes consume a large amount of memory by default. You can restrict your firewall VM to 1 GB or less.
You can restrict the memory consummtion under 'Right click -> VM Settings -> Advanced' to Max. Memory ~1024 MB or less.

There is also a Unikernel solution. Unikernels are special purpose operating systems. Thomas Leonard created a Unikernel firewall for Qubes OS which runs perfectly fine with 30 MB of RAM.

You will find resources on how to do it here:
https://github.com/talex5/qubes-mirage-firewall
http://roscidus.com/blog/blog/2016/01/01/a-unikernel-firewall-for-qubesos/

Best regards
  J. Eppler

[Alex]

Certainly doesn't sound normal. Is this consistent, or did the next reboot return RAM usage to normal levels? In latter case I'd open a terminal in the firewallVM and use top -sc to see what's consuming all this memory.

[Andrew David Wong]

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You're probably just seeing the Qubes memory manager (qmemman) in
action. It automatically distributes all available memory across all
currently running VMs (including dom0). This is intended behavior. If
you start another VM or run a program in a VM that requires more
memory, it will dynamically adjust and reallocate the memory as
needed. It's recommended to let qmemman handle this rather than trying
to manipulate memory allocation manually.

- --
Andrew David Wong (Axon)
Community Manager, Qubes OS
https://www.qubes-os.org
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[Jane Jok]

Thank you Andrew!
It looks like it was indeed a memory balancing thing, so no reason for concern, I guess.

[Franz]

Seems interesting thanks, sometimes I wondered if there was any way to reduce the burden to have all these sysVMs always working.

But for most people, me included, changing a firewall without fully understanding it may be dangerous.  We are dealing with some core element of Qubes security.

So better to wait for some official, pre-installed and supported version of it, if any.

Best

Fran

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