the main problem I ran into with qubes is that having a xen hypervisor and an nvidia desktop graphics card in use (with proprietary nvidia drivers in use for proper performance) seem to be mutually exclusive. a xen dom0 needs to use the host system RAM in some way that causes kernel panics and crashes when the nvidia DKMS driver is loaded.

I would wager that 99% of xen related development is intended, as it should be, for dom0 server environments that will never have a keyboard, mouse or 3D capable video card plugged into the bare metal.

The reason isn't so much that xen doesn't support it but more so that graphics cards are not very well intended for isolation. Correct me if i'm wrong but i don't think you're supposed to compute 1 thing on a gpu and expect another thing to not get access. In recent time Qubes has made progress on making a GPU VM where you can compute on a secondary GPU, but it only works for amd currently.

I use nvidia every day with qubes, but just for display output. I sometimes see memory leaks where it will draw screen buffers from booting alternate OSes on another drive.

yes that as well, I would doubt highly that the people at nvidia writing the driver for their pci-e desktop graphics cards (in my case was an NVS 510) are putting much consideration into things like xen. the card hardware and driver design is intended for single-user environments...

Archive link:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220113063412/https://blog.open...

>> Currently stuck on plumbing problems.

As is everything written in nix!