can't assign enough RAM to the VM

[David Brenner]

QEMU version: 1.6.90.0 from 2013 11 16
Host OS: Windows XP SP3 x86
Host machine: 3.2 GHz AMD Athlon 64 dual core processor, 4 GB DDR II (3.2 seen by the OS) memory
Guest OS: Grub4Dos boot manager menu
Problem: you can't assign more than 880 MB memory to the VM, although with 0.15.1.0 version you can assign up to 1179 MB.

[Stefan Weil (ubuntu-weilnetz)]

QEMU currently needs contiguous memory for the guest memory. Hosts running 32 bit Windows only provide about 2 GiB for programs. This 2 GiB is used for the executable, all loaded dlls and dynamic memory. Especially the dlls cause memory fragmentation, so newer versions of QEMU which need more dlls get less contiguous memory.

Running 32 bit QEMU on 64 bit Windows helps, and 64 bit QEMU also has no problem with allocating a large guest RAM.

[Thomas Huth (th-huth)]

Could we close this bug now - I think most people are using 64-bit host systems nowadays?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for QEMU because there has been no activity for 60 days.]