session managers for VMs?

[Daniel Allcock]

Sometimes I need to shut down a qube I'm working in for some reason
(changing out sys-net for a specialized sys-net, or closing sensitive
material before working in a public place).  It would be nice to be able
to come back to the same window setup I left, when restarting the qube.

dom0 has this kind of session management via xfce.  Is it possible to
run a session manager in another qube?  How would I do this? I know how
to start a window manager using exec, but I haven't figured out the X
startup files in the VMs yet.  Perhaps each vm already has a window
manager running?  But if so then I still need to enable that wm's
session manager.

Even better would be to "hibernate" a qube by suspending it to disk, but
I know the qubes team has other priorities. I'm hoping per-vm session
management is something I could do right now.

Thank you very much,
Daniel

[Manuel Amador (Rudd-O)]

X11 session management is dead (as much as it pains me to say that), and
so is multiple sessions by a single user (thank systemd session
management and dconf for that).

Best bet would be to implement actual hibernate/thaw for VMs.  That's a
tall order though.

--
Rudd-O
http://rudd-o.com/

[brenda...@gmail.com]

On Friday, October 5, 2018 at 12:13:42 AM UTC-4, Manuel Amador (Rudd-O) wrote:
> On 2018-09-22 07:13, Daniel Allcock wrote:
> > Even better would be to "hibernate" a qube by suspending it to disk,
> > but I know the qubes team has other priorities. I'm hoping per-vm
> > session management is something I could do right now.
>

> Best bet would be to implement actual hibernate/thaw for VMs.  That's a
> tall order though.

Under Qubes 4.0, I've found that Win7 VMs can hibernate (at the guest OS level, of course), though now I am beginning to suspect that was only with a non-templated HVM. Why so difficult for Linux VMs?

Hmm...ok...
- Significant additional work to support Templating w/ Hibernation, as I alluded to above (e.g. managing additional template disk changesets until hibernated systems that depend on them are thawed and shut down)?
- Preferring hypervisor-initiated hibernate for additional security or performance reasons?
- More issues?

Brendan