On Friday, November 24, 2017 at 2:01:18 AM UTC, Ray Joseph wrote: > Yuraeitha, > > Thank you. All of that was news. The need to run all VMs as HVM is the only > one that seems to be a concern. When I get wifi working, I never lose it. > This was a fresh install and I am testing with this machine. > > I haven't been able to find how to convert existing VMs to HVM. Please > suggest where I might find this. I've been going through docs and have not > found it. > > Ray
Good to hear you got stable WiFi :) Almost all (if not all) the docs are currently out-of-date when it comes to Qubes 4, but up-to-date when it comes to Qubes 3.2. This is why there is currently no doc for changing PV to HVM, or vice versa. HVM is prefered for security in Qubes 4, however both modes can give different hardware trouble. For example I personally get issues running PV, despite having PV working flawlessly back in Qubes 3.2. Others from what I can read might have issues with HVM, and need to fall back to PV instead. That's why you can switch to whichever mode is preferred. But in terms of security HVM is better than PV. However HVM is not perfect either, but nontheless an improvement over PV. From what I've seen the developers discuss, it seems like the plan is to move towards PVH in a future Qubes release. This is in turn an improvement over HVM. So PV < HVM < PVH. So you want HVM for now, but can change to PVH in a future Qubes release, probably with the same command by then. Unfortunately there is no easy way to print out which VM is in PV or HVM. At least, I haven't found it if there is any. The usual 'qvm-ls' command, usually used to print VM information like disk usages, network use, template use, etc. still appears to be in Qubes 3.2. version. For example a PV/HVM print in qvm-ls would seem like something extremely useful to add into the qvm-ls tool, so my guess is it's still something that needs fixing. Especially when PVH is added to the mix in a future Qubes release. the format, for example 'qvm-ls --format-help' doesn't give any PV/HVM information either in any of the various flags to print more details of different kinds. (btw, the qvm-ls --format disk' command is useful if you want to know how much each VM is using disk space, now that the Qubes Manager has been removed in Qubes 4. It can be troublesome if one of your VM's is eating up a lot of disk space and you can't find which one, especially on small SSD drives. That command can help with that. Anyway, back to the PV/HVM issue. The command to print PV/HVM, if you're not familiar with the command already, then it can also give other VM information, try type 'qvm-prefs vm-name' on whichever vm you want to check VM preferences on. You'll see the virt_mode in here for the PV/HVM, along with various other VM specific preferences for that VM. Optionally; for less terminal spam, you can type in this instead: qvm-prefs vm-name virt_mode If it gives you back PV print in terminal chat, then use keyboard arrow-up, so you can re-use the same command again, and then add HVM afterwards, so it becomes like this qvm-prefs vm-name virt_mode HVM Then repeat, go through all your VM's that might be in a PV state, be it TemplateVM's, AappVMs, ServiceVM's, DisposableVM's, etc. Probably all your VM's originating from Qubes 4, are already set to HVM, but almost certainly, any VM you got from a Qubes 3.2. backup are in PV state. As far as I know, the Qubes team made it so the Qubes installer might default back to PV if it cannot install with HVM, if true, then there is a risk some of your original Qubes 4 VM's are in PV as well. If you want to be absolutely sure, spend a few minutes running through all your VM's to verify. Technically you don't need to print out, and can just use the change command on every VM, but it might be good to know if you corrected any, so making a print in chat first before changing, might be informative, especially if on a VM that previously has given trouble, or if the VM will give you trouble after changed to HVM. So it's a good idea to keep an eye out for changes you make instead of just rolling it out on all. Also if some of the original VM's after install or VM's created in Qubes 4, are PV. Then it might be because your hardware doesn't like HVM and falls back to PV instead. Might be a good idea to keep in mind, start slow and verify if it can run HVM before changing all the other VM's if that's the case. Personally I had to delete some of my AppVM's after changing from PV to HVM, as while it was an improvement, it wasn't enough in my situation to fix all of the issues. So I transfered my data and files from the few bad behaving AppVM's to a new Qubes 4 VM. The only AppVm's that missbehaved, were Qubes 3.2. backup AppVm's. Oddly, it was only some of them, and not all of them that misbehaved. To this day, I still don't know why that was the case. However, now most things works smoothly on my hardware at least. Hopefully that should fix any issues if you got any :) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "qubes-users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/qubes-users/fc05cd6e-7bff-4945-9ba2-50e0dcd1bec9%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
