[Xen-users] Xen 4.3.1 ignoring dom0_mem command line parameter?

[Philippe Gagnon <philgagnon1@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

I'm setting up a server running Xen 4.3.1 on Gentoo but I am running
into a weird issue. My machine has 64GB of RAM total. I'm trying to
set dom0's memory but no matter what I do it seems that the memory
available to dom0 decreases when a VM is started. After a while, the
system locks up; it responds to ping requests and shows the login
prompt (on which you can enter a username, but the password input
never appears) and that's it. When we managed to get a dmesg, it
showed that the system ran out of memory.

I have the following options on the kernel line for xen:

(XEN) Command line: placeholder dom0_mem=12288M,max:12288M dom0_max_vcpus=4

And I have the following options on the kernel line for dom0:

placeholder root=ZFS=tank/dom0 ro apparmor=1 security=apparmor

After starting a few test VMs (about 40), xm and xl report different
values with regards to the memory available to the dom0:

prometheus ~ # xm list
Name                                        ID   Mem VCPUs      State   Time(s)
Domain-0                                     0 12288     4     r-----   1277.6

prometheus ~ # xl list
Name                                        ID   Mem VCPUs      State   Time(s)
Domain-0                                     0 12040     4     r-----    1279.1

/etc/xen/xl.conf is at its default value, but setting it to off has no
effect either:
#autoballoon="auto"

and I have set the following options in /etc/xen/xend-config.sxp:
(dom0-min-mem 12582912)
(enable-dom0-ballooning no)

The values in /proc/meminfo do not change:
prometheus xen # cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal:       12233120 kB
MemFree:         2055792 kB
Buffers:            2892 kB
Cached:           250984 kB

I have been banging my head on my desk for a few days about this. Any
help would be appreciated.

Thank you so much,

Philippe

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