Hope to install the OS on an SSD and /home on a spinning disk

[toront...@gmail.com]

I intend to reinstall 3.2 which is currently running on somewhat undersized SSD. This time I would like to keep most of the semi-static portions of the OS and templates on the SSD for speed and to reduce wear on the SSD and the more dynamic parts on a spinning disk. If this were a conventional Linux distro, I would put /tmp, /var, /home in separate partitions on the spinner and the rest on the SSD. I would tend to put swap on the spinner also because with the amount of memory in this box, I do not expect swap to be used much, if at all and would rather wast space on the disk than the SSD.

The problem is that the more I think about it, the more convinced I have become that I do not actually understand the file system structure in Qubes OS.

I have done some keyword searches here but have not found what I need. I would appreciate any pointers as to where I could find this info or if it is compact, a list of what to put where would be great. I am fully comfortable with fdisk so I do not need help with the partitioning itself, unless there is some unusual gotchas in Qubes.

I think I need to still put /tmp and /Var on the disk but I think I understand that the /home for each of the VMs actually reside in /var but I do not know what is happening with /tmp.

Thank you in advance.

[Chris Laprise]

These are the two methods for R3.2:

https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/secondary-storage/

https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/storage-pools/

The first uses symlinks for each appVM folder. I'm not sure but I think
you can symlink the whole appvms folder if you want all appVM storage to
go to the other drive automatically.

--

Chris Laprise, tas...@posteo.net
https://github.com/tasket
https://twitter.com/ttaskett
PGP: BEE2 20C5 356E 764A 73EB 4AB3 1DC4 D106 F07F 1886

[toront...@gmail.com]

Thank you Chris. I'll sit down and have a read this weekend.

[Ron Qubed]

I did this when I installed 3.2, but with a tweak to what's described in the docs: rather than symlinks (which it says break the backups), I used the existing directory as a mountpoint. I have some detailed notes I've meant to write up properly. I'll see if I can get them pasted in here later. But basically I:

1. Installed QubesOS normally, using just the SSD (with a tiny swap space, just to stop Qubes from complaining every boot, but that's optional).

2. Set up two hard drives mirrored with mdraid, and encrypted with LUKS.

3. Manually decrypted and mounted the drive (the two drives are seen as one md0 drive) to a temporary mount point.

4. Ensured all appvms were shutdown, and moved all of them to the new drive (these were the only ones I was really worried about; the rest I can get with a reinstall).

5. Unmounted md0 and remounted it on top of the old appvms directory.

6. Tested that everything worked as expected (appvms startup, function, and shutdown properly).

7. Edited fstab, crypttab, and mdadm.conf to ensure these get mounted during boot.

8. Rebooted, and all was good. A few more steps, but no symlinks, appvms all on a separate, encrypted, mirrored drive. A nice little feature too is that since I used the same passphrase for md0 as for the SSD, it only prompts once for them during boot.

Ron