Re: Live memory allocation?

Alberto Treviño
2009-03-28T13:38:38Z

On Thursday 26 March 2009 08:11:02 am Tomasz Chmielewski wrote:
> Like, two guests, each with 2 GB memory allocated only use 1 GB of
> host's memory (as long as they don't have many programs/buffers/cache)?
>
> So yes, it's also supported by KVM.

The problem I've seen with this feature is that Windows guests end up taking
all of their available memory once they are up and running. For example,
booting Windows XP in KVM 82 show a steady increase in memory. Then about
the time the login box is about to appear, memory usage jumps to the maximum
allowed to the VM (512 MB in this case). I remember reading somewhere
Windows would try to initialize all memory during boot, causing KVM to
allocate all memory. VMware, however (and I don't know about VirtualBox)
knows about this and works around it, making sure memory isn't all allocated
during the Windows boot process.

Would there a way to work around the Windows memory allocation issue in KVM
as well?