Privacy benefits aside, does qubes run better than a typical vm like virtualbox? I tend to fiddle with distros a lot and I feel qubes might be a good choice, though I’m wondering about how efficient it is
AFAIK it has very limited hardware support.
It is not like ‘very limited’. But generally they are focused around modern Intel CPU, and can have issues on new AMD CPU. And it won’t work on very old CPUs without proper virtualization features.
https://www.qubes-os.org/hcl/ can hint on what Qubes will work better.
Also see the system requirements: https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/system-requirements/
It’s faster than virtualbox because there is lower recourse use from the base system and it uses qemu. Qemu/kvm is the fastest option for vms on Linux, but it isn’t exklusiv to qubes, you can also use it via the terminal on any distro or with a GUI like gnome boxes
Not that I know, but you could spin up two VMs on your current system, one with Qubes and one with base fedora and compare the performance of vm’s
It uses the Xen hypervisor, not qemu/KVM. Technically it is a Xen kernel virtualizing Linux since it is a type 1 hypervisor.
KVM and virt-manager are faster than VirtualBox.
QubesOS uses a dedicated Hypervisor, Xen, which has this as its only job so I assume it is secure.
Probably, yes. Qubes AppVMs don’t run the whole DE inside it. Also, Qubes uses automatic memory balancing for VMs, so users doesn’t need to care about it much.
What is a “typical VM”?
Qubes uses the type-1 Xen hypervisor that runs at a similar privilege to the kernel of other OSes. KVM is a type-1 hypervisor implemented as a Linux kernel module. VirtualBox is a type-2 hypervisor that runs in userspace. Of these three, Xen is the most performant hypervisor because virtualization is all it does.
If by “typical VM” you mean a guest OS running inside a window of the host OS, then Qubes will always come out on top because the graphics pipeline is much less of a bottleneck.
Qubes uses the type-1 Xen hypervisor that runs at a similar privilege to the kernel of other OSes. KVM is a type-1 hypervisor implemented as a Linux kernel module.
What tells them apart them? When would you use one vs the other?
Perhaps Xen for having all machines, including the one that controls the hypervisor, being virtualized, as opposed to KVM/QEMU running on the control bare-metal with VMs on top?
Basically, yes. Xen is a bespoke hypervisor. All it does, and all it can do, is run VMs. There is no host OS – management is done through a privileged VM called dom0. KVM is a part of the Linux kernel. Virtualization is only one of its features. VMs run alongside, and are managed by, the host OS.
