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Virtual Box on Snow Leopard can't more than 3.5GB of memory?

Posted: 15. Aug 2010, 16:10
by abigagli
Hi all,
I'm running latest (3.2.8) virtualbox on Snow Leopard host in a MacBook Pro with 8GB memory.
When configuring virtual machines, I can only assign a max of 3584 MB of RAM.
Also, if I assign a value very near to that max, I then get very often errors for "Host Low Memory" in my Solaris 10 guest.
I tried to search the forum and bug reports but couldn't find anything...

Note that 3.2.8 under windows 7 x64 (run via bootcamp on the same machine) can perfectly see all the 8GB of memory and I can run my solaris guest with 5-6 GB of memory with no problem.

Any help?

Thanks,
Andrea.

Re: Virtual Box on Snow Leopard can't more than 3.5GB of memory?

Posted: 15. Aug 2010, 16:15
by Sasquatch
Your Host OS boots to 32 bit mode by default. You have to boot it into 64 bit mode in order to allow more RAM to be allocatable. You won't get the 'low host memory' error either.

Re: Virtual Box on Snow Leopard can't more than 3.5GB of memory?

Posted: 16. Aug 2010, 16:59
by abigagli
Gosh!
You're right, I completely overlooked this since I think I've read somewhere that SL on latest hardware now boots by default 64bit, and my MBP is from a couple of weeks ago...
But checking my system profiler confirmed I had actually booted 32 bit, forcing it to 64 did indeed solve the problem.

Thanks,
Andrea.