Re: [qubes-users] Are my AppVMs living in a tiny corner of my hard drive?

[Chris Laprise]

On 12/01/2016 11:52 PM, mojosam wrote:
> I have a 110 GB SSD. If I look at the settings for any of my AppVMs, it says that the "Private storage max. size" is 2048 MB (which is the default). It also says that "System storage max size" is 10240 MB.
>
> Is 10240 MB the maximum size that an AppVM is allowed to get, or is that the size of the drive it's living on? If it's the latter, I'm concerned about why that's one tenth the size of my drive.
>
> What I want to do is create a few more AppVMs, but I'm worried about running out of space on my drive.
>

Each appVM's storage lives in a separate disk image file that is
"sparse". That means it grows or shrinks depending on how much data you
have added or deleted. But it can only grow as far as the "Private
storage max" that you set.

You could set a bunch of appVMs to each have a Private max size that is
larger than your hard drive (or, combined, their Private max could be
larger than your hard drive) and they will work fine unless/until you
add too much data to them. That setting is so you can expand appVM
storage to sizes that will reasonably hold your data, and you can keep
expanding the max as needed.

The "System storage max" refers to the VM's system root image (where the
guest OS lives), not your hard disk. It means that particular template
(or standalone) OS can't grow beyond that size. You probably won't need
to adjust this setting. For VMs that use a template, the actual system
size is the 'Size' you see listed for the template in Qubes Manager.

To get an idea of the free space available to Qubes, you can enter 'df
-m' in a dom0 command prompt to see the value in megabytes. Or in the
GUI (KDE), you can right-click on the taskbar or desktop to add a Widget
that displays overall disk space.

Chris

[mojosam]

Thanks for the clarification. I think I understand that better now. I couldn't find that in the documentation. I was definitely confusing system storage and private storage.

I was playing around with 'df -m' before I posted that question, and it was just confusing me more. But just now I created another VM and reran 'df -m' and saw which directory got fuller. I should have done that first. This whole thing is slowly starting to gel in my mind. (I've used Linux sporadically over the years, but I've never had to administer it. I guess there's a lot I still don't know about how Unixy computers think.)