2 GIG memory limit on 4 GIG host.

[dominic_pr]

Hello,
I am running VirtualBox vers 4.3.26 r98988 on Windows 7 64 bit Enterprise edition with 4 GIG of physical memory and 256 GIG SSD.
The system is a dell Latitude E6430 with i5-3340M CPU @ 2,7GHz.

I am running Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS 64 bit.

I have created a Host VM with 3 GIG of physical memory.
The Guest host up and running, the free- go command indicates that i have only 2 gig allocated.
total used free ....
MEM: 2 0 2
Swap 0 0 0

I pretty sure that the number should be 3.

The application I need to run needs more than 2.

Any ideas or suggestions or is this a bug?

Thanks,

[mpack]

I don't use 64bit host OS's myself, however a 32bit host OS running on a 4GB system reserves 2GB for the host OS leaving 2GB for the app. I'm not sure why a more RAM hungry host OS would be more generous with the same amount of starting RAM. On the contrary, I'd guess that it's likely that the 64bit host OS will map the first 4GB in a similar way, for backwards compatibility reasons.

It seems to me that if your app requires more RAM than your host can provide, then you need to add more RAM to your host.

A VM log file will tell you how much host RAM is available to the VM. If you zip and attach that log file here then I can verify the numbers for you.

p.s. It would be really helpful if you would get straight the meaning of "host" and "guest". The host is the side that offers resources, the guest is the side that consumes them. The host is your physical PC and it's OS. The guest is the VM and its OS. There is no such thing as a "host VM" or a "guest host", though happily I'm still reasonably confident that I understood what you meant.