I’m running Whonix through KVM on Debian. When I first installed it, I had this same issue with Workstation and simply reinstalled the VMs. However, the second time booting up those new VMs, I got the same issue, but with Gateway. The boot menu shows up, it boots for a couple of seconds, before going to a black screen and then eventually showing this message:
i. ibb .co/1frZnQBv/Screenshot-Whonix-Gateway-2025-09-08-18-10-52.png
(remove the two spaces in the link)
The only thing that was helpful from this was telling me to add those scripts to the kernal command line, but I cannot find anything online that shows how to do that without the VM fully booted. I did as much research as possible, I restart my host machine, I increased the available CPUs and memory, but to no avail.
If anyone could help me out with this it would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance!
Have you figured out the problem? I have this exact same error and it also happened under the second boot up of new VMs. Workstation is fine but Gateway has this problem
The errors shown are indicating that the kernel can’t find the root filesystem anymore (which is where the rest of the OS is).
Could you provide detailed steps for reproducing this, starting from the first virsh command you use to install one of the Whonix .xml files into libvirt?
I just followed the wiki Whonix for KVM . I also verified the downloaded files and they have Good signature and hash.
From the virt manager GUI i added 2GB RAM to Gateway and 4GB RAM to workstation. Cpu I kept at 1 for both VMs. I didn’t edit anything else.
Before installing the new VMs I deleted the old ones from virt manager along with the virtual networks network (Edit → Connection Details → Virtual Networks)
When booting up for the first time using persistence mode to install newest updates it works fine. But when I then shut down and boot up again (either persistence and live) it boots up with a blinking cursor with a black screen and stays like that for about 3 minutes until is starts returning these errors for about 30 seconds.
This only happens in Whonix Gateway. Workstation works completely fine
Edit: I checked again with a new Gateway VM and even without installing updates it has the same issue
Edit 2: Checked again with first booting into live mode and second boot into live mode again and this issue doesn’t exist. So this issue seems to be Whonix Gateway specific where persistence mode writes something to disk that breaks the system that live mode wouldn’t be able to do
That’s very strange, since this doesn’t happen to me on my system, which runs Kubuntu 24.04 LTS. What host OS are you using? Maybe that has something to do with it…
Fedora 42 KDE. Could the issue maybe be with SELinux? It didn’t happen before though with the same host OS so not sure if its something introduced recently
Just tried on a fresh Fedora 42 installation, so far both Whonix-Gateway and Whonix-Workstation 17 are booting and functioning just fine for me, both before and after updates, in persistent and live (and persistent sysmaint) modes. So I’m not really sure what to think other than maybe you have a corrupted Whonix image or something is wrong with your host OS.