Max RAM size for VM

[socratis]

But it looks strange that VBox reports so low RAM available. The native FreeBSD monitor (top) reports quite different values

VirtualBox does not report the memory. FreeBSD does. That's why I said to repeat it with 192GB and look at the 'top' output before you launch the VM.

[Selin]

VM RAM=192GB

VM is Off

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last pid:  1019;  load averages:  0.14,  0.09,  0.03                                                                                                        up 0+00:06:49  19:02:33
38 processes:  1 running, 37 sleeping
CPU:  0.2% user,  0.0% nice,  0.0% system,  0.0% interrupt, 99.8% idle
Mem: 112M Active, 216M Inact, 1721M Wired, 247G Free
ARC: 67M Total, 23M MFU, 42M MRU, 16K Anon, 451K Header, 1774K Other
Swap: 1024M Total, 1024M Free

VM is On

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last pid:  9452;  load averages:  0.37,  1.53,  1.08                                                                                                        up 0+00:28:59  19:24:43
46 processes:  1 running, 45 sleeping
CPU:  0.5% user,  0.0% nice,  2.5% system,  0.0% interrupt, 96.9% idle
Mem: 982M Active, 307M Inact, 200G Wired, 48G Free
ARC: 9807M Total, 1742M MFU, 8022M MRU, 144K Anon, 22M Header, 21M Other
Swap: 1024M Total, 1024M Free

[Selin]

VirtualBox does not report the memory.

I mean VBox WebUI:

VBox-webUI.png (7.42 KiB) Viewed 4784 times

But maybe it is just a bug of phpvirtualbox port... It always displays familiar usage despite VM is running or off.

[socratis]

OK, something's rotten in Denmark as I suspected.

• top
  Mem: 112M Active, 216M Inact, 1721M Wired, 247G Free
  VirtualBox
  00:00:00.011107 Host RAM: 262015MB total, 3598MB available

'top' is reporting 247GB while VirtualBox less than 4GB!

[Selin]

Does it mean 240GB is a top VM RAM limit?
(192GB VM RAM + 48GB Host Free)...

[mpack]

Or I've miss the key from the article you suggested?

Please ignore the suggested article, that was intended for a different discussion entirely - I wondered where it had gone! I was very rushed yesterday, lots going on at work.

[scottgus1]

Maybe this is the problem:

VBox WebUI . . . phpvirtualbox port

Are you using the official Virtualbox downloaded from here: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
Or do you have someone else's fork installed?

[Selin]

I'm using FreeBSD 10.3 Release port.
Not sure whether FreeBSD changes something in VirtualBox-5.1.6.tar.bz2 ...

I have a version that the reason of my problem is in PAE/NX as now I can run VM with RAM > 128GB for a whole day and no crashes occurred. All I did is simply unchecked it on Memory setup page.
As I understand - PAE/NX is needed for 32 bit OSs to access more than 4GB RAM.
64 bit OS uses native access up to 2TB.

[scottgus1]

Interesting. Most folks don't have the luxury of 256GB of ram - remember Socratis's "do you have a spare system that I can test this on? I promise I'll return it soon... "?

Maybe a glitch, maybe something that has to be remembered.

Since you are using FreeBSD's port, this may be a bug that might or might not be in the official Virtualbox. If you wish to, you could put the official download on your host and test the PAE/NX switch. If you get the same results with the official Virtualbox as you do with the FreeBSD port, then the developers would probably like to know about it on the Bugtracker (I suspect the developers would only like to hear about it if you test with the Official Virtualbox download, though, so please try that test first before reporting it.)

[Selin]

Unfortunately, I cannot play with VBox packeges in the nearest future ...
The only I can do is to test the flag PAE/NX on official FreeBSD port.

[socratis]

For anyone reading this thread, here's some additional information that might help. Specifically, in the Discuss the 5.1.18 release:

Setting the following might help:

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VBoxManage setextradata VM_NAME VBoxInternal/Devices/acpi/0/Config/PciPref64Enabled 0

This command disables the announcement of an ACPI resource which is buggy in case of a huge memory.