Hello. Whonix VirtualBox system is designed to have one single .vdi disk with one partition with / mountpoint so it must be stored whether on fast SSD or slow HDD. But what if a user have a small SSD and big HDD? A user might want to have high system speed and a lot of free space for storing data.
So, I suggest to make two .vdi files for Whonix Workstation. One is for system with mountpoint / and the other one for /home (and may be /var). So a user can place system .vdi disk to a fast SSD drive and userdata .vdi disk to a slow HDD drive. Do you support my opinion?
Functionality wise that’s a good idea. Similar to what Qubes is doing in TemplateBasedVMs, a split root and private image.
Useful feature.
- Making user data backups (only /home) easier.
- Perhaps making re-installation/upgrades to newer Whonix releases either. (Replace root image and keep private image.)
Implementation wise it’s difficult:
- During VirtualBox ova import, there is no way to control to which disk location disk images are imported. (Unless perhaps there was a Whonix-Host operating system using VirtualBox.) Therefore saying root image to /var and private image to /home isn’t possible. Unless the user manually adjusts these settings. Nevertheless it would be a useful feature.
- Stable mount configuration.
- Legacy support for users with “only” one virtual hdd.
- Multiple platform support. (Whonix KVM)
Help welcome. I suggest to document how to do this manually first.