qubes-app-linux-usb-proxy VS qubes-mirage-firewall

Regarding USB, yeah, the usb-proxy doesn't have support for all things. I think it comes down to stuff not implemented in Linux USBIP or USB support (I've had issues with some device controllers not actually implementing what they claim to implement).

2) https://github.com/mirage/qubes-mirage-firewall is by far a better firewall for Qubes than OpenBSD ever will be - unikernels are far more secure than a traditional operating system is and you can read all about it on https://mirageos.org/

That's correct. It does mean that the closest to a self-contained program you can run is a unikernel like the mirage-firewall, unfortunately. On the upside, those remain easily portable to essentially anything that can run VMs so long as you adjust the image format.

That sounds similar to a unikernel. There are actual uses for those in seL4 and Qubes OS such as a firewall-qube (in theory unikernel qubes should be able to take far less system resources to run than full Linux+distro qubes).

Here's one that is "production" ready: the Mirage-Firewall microkernel running on Qubes OS.[0]

[0] : https://github.com/mirage/qubes-mirage-firewall

sys-net, sys-firewall and other administrative vms should slowly migrate to unikernels instead of running linux, which should help with ram usage. The mirage.io project seems to build a couple qubes vms, for example https://github.com/mirage/qubes-mirage-firewall is a firewall which they indicate to give 64Mb of ram.