I have a xen server with xen-4.1.3, linux-image-3.2.0-3-amd64, debian squeeze and 16Gb of RAM. The domain-0 has 1Gb of ram, the rest of memory belongs to the hypervisor. I want to start a guest domain with a minimal amount of memory and increase it runtime later.
When I start a guest domain with 256Mb of ram and run xm mem-set domu 4Gb, I get ~3Gb only in domu and a guest domain free says:
root@test:~# free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 2830620 72868 2757752 0 2432 43504
-/+ buffers/cache: 26932 2803688
Swap: 1048572 0 1048572
And a guest domain dmesg says:
[ 0.000000] Memory: 175912k/2883584k available (3527k kernel code, 448k absent, 2707224k reserved, 3210k data, 612k init)
When I start a guest domain with 2Gb of ram I can run xm mem-set domu 7Gb and get ~7Gb of ram in a guest domain:
root@test:~# free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 6828228 74944 6753284 0 1328 12568
-/+ buffers/cache: 61048 6767180
Swap: 1048572 0 1048572
And a guest domain dmesg:
[ 0.000000] Memory: 1674960k/16651264k available (3527k kernel code, 448k absent, 14975856k reserved, 3210k data, 612k init)
How can I start a guest domain with a minimal amount of ram (256Mb) and increase it under 15Gb?