Base Memory not Reflected

[Saravanan Kandasamy]

VirtualBox: Version 4.2.18 r88780
Host : Windows 8
Guest: Ubuntu 10.4

Host have RAM of 16GB.
Allocated 11GB as base memory in my Virtualbox settings for my Guest.
When running the Guest, and checking the memory using

Code: Select all

free -m

I find only 3529MB is detected.

Is there anything I need to do to ensure my Guest get the base memory alloted?

I am unable to find the answer in the Manual. Kindly assist to point to me if there is already previous discussion done on this, I could not find it either.

If you need to know how many bits is the Virtualbox, can you teach me how to check this. Google was not kind to me either.

rgds
Saravanan K

[Ramshankar]

Unless you post the actual output of the "free" command along with a VBox.log we can only speculate and guess what you might be misinterpreting.

You might also want to check memory using "cat /proc/meminfo"

[Saravanan Kandasamy]

Dear Ramshankar,

Sorry if I was not been clear,

As requested

Code: Select all

saravanan:~$ free -m

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          3529        440       3088          0         92        173
-/+ buffers/cache:        174       3355
Swap:         1307          0       1307

Code: Select all

saravanan:~$ file /sbin/init
/sbin/init: ELF 32-bit LSB shared object, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.15, stripped

Code: Select all

saravanan:~$ uname -a
Linux saravanan-laptop 2.6.32-46-generic #105-Ubuntu SMP Fri Mar 1 00:08:49 UTC 2013 i686 GNU/Linux

Code: Select all

saravanan:~$ cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal:        3614396 kB
MemFree:         3135356 kB
Buffers:           97184 kB
Cached:           189804 kB
SwapCached:            0 kB
Active:           203536 kB
Inactive:         227012 kB
Active(anon):     143860 kB
Inactive(anon):     4316 kB
Active(file):      59676 kB
Inactive(file):   222696 kB
Unevictable:           0 kB
Mlocked:               0 kB
HighTotal:       2760648 kB
HighFree:        2418992 kB
LowTotal:         853748 kB
LowFree:          716364 kB
SwapTotal:       1339384 kB
SwapFree:        1339384 kB
Dirty:                44 kB
Writeback:             0 kB
AnonPages:        143568 kB
Mapped:            52256 kB
Shmem:              4612 kB
Slab:              31464 kB
SReclaimable:      21036 kB
SUnreclaim:        10428 kB
KernelStack:        2200 kB
PageTables:         4184 kB
NFS_Unstable:          0 kB
Bounce:                0 kB
WritebackTmp:          0 kB
CommitLimit:     3146580 kB
Committed_AS:     484988 kB
VmallocTotal:     122880 kB
VmallocUsed:       68196 kB
VmallocChunk:      48924 kB
HardwareCorrupted:     0 kB
HugePages_Total:       0
HugePages_Free:        0
HugePages_Rsvd:        0
HugePages_Surp:        0
Hugepagesize:       4096 kB
DirectMap4k:       12280 kB
DirectMap4M:      897024 kB

Could it be, Ubuntu 32 bit is not detecting the configured base memory (i.e 11GB) ?

rgds
Saravanan K

[mpack]

Notice that Ramshankar also asked for a VBox.log (from the Logs subfolder of the VM). Please zip it before posting.

[Saravanan Kandasamy]

Dear mpack,

Missed that. As requested, per attached.

rgds
Saravanan K

[mpack]

Please confirm whether this is a 32bit or 64bit guest? I note that the RAM limit is roughly correct for a 32bit guest, and that PAE has not been enabled.

[Saravanan Kandasamy]

Dear mpack,

You are right it is 32bit Guest. The

Code: Select all

uname -a

and

Code: Select all

file /sbin/init

is produced above.

Enabled PAE now to test it, and there is no change in memory.

Does 32bit Guest would not be able to support higher RAM than 3529MB? Is upgrading it to 64bit is the only way to make full use of the resources? I am midway installing 64bit Guest to check if it can detect the 11GB RAM.

rgds
Saravanan K

[mpack]

A 32bit guest usually cannot address more than 2^32 bytes of memory (4GB). Of that, some will be reserved for hardware and BIOS, so being left with something like 3.5GB is normal.

I'm not familiar with Ubuntu 10.04, e.g. I don't know that it supports PAE, and even if it does, that you can just turn it on at any time. You might need to recompile the kernel.