Hey, hopefully this is the right place and I apologize if it isn’t. I was playing around with whonix and QEMU and KVM on Arch linux. Everything installation wise went fine, well I thought it did at least, but running a an apt-get update && dist-upgrade has the vm start filling up /var and it gets to the point where the VM freezes and I have to start deleting journals in / to make space. I’m sure I could just create a hard disk image elsewhere, and install whonix onto that but the guide said to stick it in /var/lib/libvirt… so I didn’t want to do something that would end up compromising an aspect of whonix that I didn’t understand. Any advice would be lovely. Thank you for your help.
What file(s) do fill up?
Unfortunately I’m not in front of my laptop at the moment but I believe when I check, all the memory is being used by /var/lib/libvirt/images/* where* is the actual whonix workstation and gateway. I had moved the q.cow2 images there per the kvm installation guide but after this issue tried to cp with sparse=always to see if that works. Both had the same result. /var/lib/libvirt just fills up. Did I do something wrong? I don’t have /var separate from /root in partition, I guess I could resize root but is there some other issue here? When I get back to my computer I’ll gladly copy/paste any output you would like.
Check the real size of the images. See:
We don’t expect a separate /var. Just enough space in /var.
Moving this to the KVM sub forum.
So should I just resize /var? Is that the best solution? I know I did cp with the --sparse=always option.
I’m a little confused by your answer, I’ve read up on sparse and maybe I’m interpreting it wrong, by using the sparse option, wouldn’t this stop it from actually filling up the physical disk? Perhaps I’m just missing something, how large does /var need to be? Even after an initial whonix install I have 8gb+ left in root but then it fills up.
The default Whonix images are 2GB in size total. It depends on what you are downloading in the workstation but they can grow up to 100GB. Make sure you resize root to account for the increasing size. How much? I don’t know I don’t administer your computer. You should check the current size of the qcow images following the instructions Patrick referred to and compare it with the current Root partition size then expand appropriately.
Most modern filesystems can work with sparse files so that’s not your problem.
Also check if there is another process is filling up /var/