Qubes OS 4.0rc1 - Fresh install - sys-net has network, but sys-firewall does not

[rossdp...@gmail.com]

I've just installed Qubes OS 4.0rc1 on my brand new MSI Pro Carbon X399 system. I'm running a 16-core CPU which seems well suited for something like Qubes OS.

I had to install a beta BIOS (v1.47) to get virtualization enabled on the board but generally it seems to be working.

I was unable to get Qubes 3.2 working at all, the installer would never load and it was just trapped in a reboot cycle, that's why I'm using 4.0rc1.

Here is a description of my issue with 4.0rc1:

- Installation of 4.0rc1 succeeds without errors.
- When I login, I get a message that sys-net has connected to the network.
- Firefox on sys-net is able to connect to the Internet. No obvious problems with it.
- Firefox on sys-firewall is NOT able to connect to the Internet.
- Firefox on all other VMs is NOT able (it's using sys-firewall which is broken).

I am a software developer, very familiar with using Linux (25+ years), not very familiar with dealing with hardware issues or networking configurations. (I love system administrators :)

Any ideas what's wrong with sys-firewall, or how I can fix it?

It's using the motherboard's eth0, that is the only networking device in the machine.

Thanks!
-rdp

[rossdp...@gmail.com]

PS- sys-firewall is using 4 GB of RAM which seems really excessive.

sys-net is using only 400 MB.

My guess is the installer screwed up something in sys-firewall, it's sucking up all the RAM I gave it and failing to work correctly as a result.

[rossdp...@gmail.com]

As a follow-up, I opened a terminal in dom0 and manually shut down sys-firewall and sys-net.

I then changed the preferences for those to use the debian-8 template instead of fedora, and disabled memory balancing for sys-net (I gave it 1 GB).

I then restarted sys-net and then sys-firewall, and now sys-firewall is working fine, as are the other VMs that are using it for network.

Not sure if something is wrong with fedora as installed by the installer that breaks sys-net, or if debian has better drivers for my motherboard or what, but at least it's working now.