Cannot persistently mount extra partitions

[Jonathanwolfe]

First, thanks to all the developers and contributors to Qubes.  This is incredible software!

I've got Qubes R3.2 installed into an SSD.  That SSD has the following partitions:

/boot (Qubes)

/ (Qubes)

/UNENCRYPTED  - An ext4 filesystem

I'd like to mount /UNENCRYPTED from one of my appvms automatically on appVM startup.  So far, I can only do it manually by starting the VM, attaching the "/dev/sda3" device, and mounting "/dev/xvdi" within the VM.

I suspect that a persistent mount should be possible with the following code in the appVM's .conf file:

<disk type='block' device='disk'>

  <driver name='phy'/>

  <source dev='/dev/sda3'/>

  <target dev='xvde' bus='xen'/>

</disk>

along with an entry in /etc/fstab of the AppVM to use /dev/xvde once created.

Unfortunately, I have not been able to test this solution because:

1) If I create the modification directly in the /var/lib/qubes/appvms/foobar/foobar.conf file, the foobar.conf file gets overwritten instead of used. (I think this happens at appVM startup)

2) If I create the modification in /var/lib/qubes/appvms/foobar/a_different.conf, the .conf file is never overwritten, but my changes to the "config" entry of /var/lib/qubes/qubes.xml gets overwritten on any updates from the Qubes VM Manager. i.e. it's not seeing my dom0 'vi' edits to this file, and instead clobbers it.

3) Trying "qvm-prefs -s foobar config  a_different.conf" returns "ERROR: Wrong propery name: 'config'"

I'm sure there's something I'm misunderstanding, and I appreciate any advice from the community.  Thanks again!

Jon

[Connor Page]

you can specify your modified config copy in qvm-start --custom-config=/path/to/config vm-name