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QubesOS – A reasonably secure operating system

(www.qubes-os.org)
176 points TheFreim | 2 comments | 11 Jul 23 18:11 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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flashback2199 ◴[11 Jul 23 18:59 UTC] No.36685709[source]▶
I really like QubesOS, but you cannot run VMs inside a qube, or other things that require VMs like Docker Desktop for Linux, because the xen hypervisor does not support nested virtualization.
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Syonyk ◴[11 Jul 23 19:40 UTC] No.36686247[source]▶
You can. It's just neither recommended nor enabled by default.

https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/nested-virtualization/14790

Poke around /etc/libvirt/libxl and your particular VM's config file. You'll find some lines like:

<feature name='vmx' policy='disable'/> <feature name='svm' policy='disable'/>

Enable it, and you should have working nested virtualization.

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flashback2199 ◴[11 Jul 23 20:06 UTC] No.36686554[source]▶
Shoot, as soon as I hit reply some neurons lit up and now I remember I was actually able to enable nested virtualization in QubesOS, and the relevant options in the VirtualBox preferences inside a qube became enabled once I did that, but whenever I tried booting any VM the whole system hanged. The same system and BIOS settings worked in Ubuntu to boot a nested VM in VirtualBox, so I think I had the BIOS settings correct. Anyhow, it seemed like a dead-end, so I abandoned it.
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1. Syonyk ◴[11 Jul 23 20:09 UTC] No.36686583[source]▶
I'll have to look at it more. I mostly use AMD systems these days, which don't support nested virt in Xen, as I understand it, but it looks like it should work on Intel.
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2. flashback2199 ◴[11 Jul 23 21:14 UTC] No.36687291[source]▶
I was on Intel when I tried. No worries though, not really planning on trying it again.