I am setting up a home office workstation. I want to be able to explore the envelope of what is currently being done with virtualization. I really like Proxmox and I am very interested by Qubes OS, although so far I have struggled with many issues/bugs.
I want to select a hardware platform that will be powerful enough to not limit me and that will have the minimum issues for such a use case.
The ryzen 7 2700x with something like 32gb of ram seems like a very nice base. Lots of thread, nice performance vs price. But I read about a lot of issues related to iommu hardware passtrough and lots of issues linked with linux graphic drivers on those vm based OS.
Since I am not looking for a lot of graphic power (no gaming and very plain video editiing, a better approach might be an I7 8700 with native intel graphics ? This would probably be pricier for the same lelvel of performance but might be a lot less of a problem to get running with qubes or proxmox ?
Looking forward to readings other x opinion on this subject
You may want to take a look at a couple of other threads here. Including mine asking questions about a virtualised system I am building.
That system may be a bit bigger than what you are looking at putting together but I am confident that a Ryzen 7 would be entirely enough oomf to run Qubes. I’ve had 3.2 running on an old 3 core laptop with 4GBs of ram (cramped but operable). A word of warning about 4.0: It appears to be the wilds at this point, which is to say untamed and (possibly) unstable. I haven’t tried it myself just yet.
I have tried qubes 4.0 on a few systems and I only managed to get it up and running on a 4 years old xeon e3 server. On that system I can get it running (acceptably) with the built in Xeon intel graphics. When I try to put a Gt750 card so I can use two monitors it still works but the window rendering becomes pitifull.
It failed to run correctly on my dell 16 gb xps13 (intel graphics) and on another e5 xeon server I tried but that is related to a weird bios running on a chinese x79 mobo. So that one is understandable.
I know the Ryzen 7 has plenty of legs for this use case. But it might be rather more unstable than an intel platform.
How successfull have you been with Qubes and non intel hardware (cpu and gpu) ?
Check out the docs for Qubes, they have a wealth of good information in there but are sometime not ideal for newbs like us.
You need to make sure that the virtualisation tech (AMD-Vi and Intel VT-x and VT-d) is enabled in the BIOS/UEFI of any system you run it on and if it can’t be it won’t run.
Geforce cards have anti-virtualisation checks built into the driver or firmware for product segmentation reasons. Can be worked around but I don’t know more. That may be what you are encountering.
That laptop was AMD and it just worked but the devs seem to use exclusively Intel (‘devil I know’ maybe). Have a look at the HCL (Hardware Compatibility List), there are a few people running on Ryzen, maybe try to get in touch through the mailing list.
Note: I don’t think Qubes is really designed with a use-case like ours in mind but it does have some nice features for it as well as being a friendlier package for Xen.
I am slowly working trough the Qubes docs. It is quite a learning curves.
Because of the problems I am running into with Qubes 4.0 on my current hardware, I have temporarily gone back to Running Proxmox 5.0 as a personnal workstation and virtualization server,
That option is super stable works extremely well over ZFS and would be my final choice if it had the same emphasis on security through compartmentalization that Qubes has.
I guess these things take time to mature… I have exchanged with a few Ryzen guys on Qubes Os but they all use gen 1 x370 or 350 boards. No real info so far about Ryzen 7 2700X and X470 mobos running Qubes 4.o.
There isn’t too much of a difference Zen to Zen+ so I would expect the story to be the same or better. I believe the issues that were had have been mostly ironed out for IOMMU and virt. You are right that there is little Qubes specific info. Look for info about IOMMU groupings for X470 MOBOs.
Maybe order from somewhere with a solid return policy and try it out?
Wendell didn’t find 4.0 very stable but that was early days.
Is anyone using Vega? (i.e., do the open source Vega drivers work on it)?
I’d be tempted to give Qubes a shot this week on my 2700X on X470 Taichi as I have a mostly blank brand new 1 TB Evo 970 i just installed in it without a “permanent” operating system set up on it yet…
My current build is a 2700X with 32 GB of RAM, heaps of SSD and 2x Vega 64s, so if the open source driver works and i could do hardware passthrough it would be an ideal platform…
I’m not seeing anything in the HCL but I think they could be made to work with minimal fidgeting.
If you need encouragement: I know many of us would love to have info about that on here and in the HCL. Just disconnect the other drives before installing, there was a bug in the installer a while ago that could break installs on other drives.
The other drives are SATA so that should be easily done - and i’ve been meaning to pull one of the smaller ones out to get my old PC up and running as a gaming box for the girl. Maybe this weekend.
If you give it a try (and I hope you do !!) please keep us posted. You will see on the Qubes news that fedora 26 and whonix have reached end of life and should be upgraded once Qubes is installed.
I would suggest that you only do that once you have played with the base installed and have not seen big bugs. The biggest issue I am struggling with is extremely laggy VM windows mouse drag (I mean a few seconds of lag !!??). I also occasionally see VM terminals becoming unresponsive for many seconds before starting to operate correctly again.
Very frustrating because the architecture of that system is in my opinion quite good.
well I will soon. I went ahead and ordered a Ryzen 2700X Asuus crosshair hero VII combo with 32 gb of GSkill 3600 RGB. Really looking forward to get that going !!
Well, tried to boot the qubesOS installer and it bitched about X startup failing. Likely doesn’t like Vega. Oh well.
It did get to the point where it said it was starting the installer, so the kernel booted at least and carried on that far on the 2700X side of things.
