Memory management on windows hosts

[omizdea]

Hi *,

I've got an Ubuntu VM (6 Gig RAM/8 cores, not busy at all) in Desktop mode running on Win10 host (64G RAM/i9 13th gen).

Could someone explain why VirtualBoxVM.exe needs to have less than half of the memory usage in RAM and more than that paged to disk? Or better, how does VirtualBox manage memory in Win10?

vbox.png (24.27 KiB) Viewed 484 times

Best,
-iulian

[fth0]

Just a short answer as a starting point for your own investigations:

On Windows hosts, type 2 hypervisors like VirtualBox use a memory type called Driver-locked memory. You can use Sysinternals RAMMap to look at The Real Thing (TM). For a full understanding on Windows memory management, you also need Sysinternals VMMap.