Slow vm start with lots of memory

[Kevin Wang <kjw@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have a machine with 386 GB of RAM, so I created a vm with memory=102400 (yeah, not a power of 2) (~100 GB ram, I'd like to make it bigger actually) but it appears to take 8 minutes to allocate ram or something before it actually starts. Is this normal?

Dell Poweredge R730xd, Ubuntu 22, xen 4.16.0-1~ubuntu2.1

xl list gives me a slowly incrementing "mem" value until it finishes, allocates cpu's, but...

work-hvm                                     1 102201     0     --p---       0.0
work-hvm                                     1 102392    42     --p---       0.0

but then sits at 0.0 cpu and 'p' forever?

Starting this vm up is highly unreliable. Sometimes it takes several attempts. Any suggestions?

   - Kevin

# cat /etc/xen/auto/work.hvm

builder = "hvm"
name = "work-hvm"
memory = "102400"
vcpus = 42
vif = ['']
#disk = ['phy:/dev/hdd/work-root,hda,w','file:/d/dmg/ubuntu-24.04.1-desktop-amd6
4.iso,hdc:cdrom,r']
disk = ['phy:/dev/hdd/work-root,hda,w']
vnc = 1
boot = "dc"
#cpu = "host"
cpu = "kvm64"