virtualbox 3584MB memory limit?

Question

I am running Oracle VM VirtualBox Manager 4.1.12_Ubuntu on a 32-bit Ubuntu laptop with 8GB RAM and the 64-bit Ubuntu VM only runs with up to 3584MB of RAM (with "Enable PAE/NX" setting activated in Virtualbox, which determines it should be working in the host). How can I overcome this memory limitation and run the 64bit VM with more memory?

Edit: PAE should be enabled in the laptop, since I can see the 8GB of RAM for the 32-bit Ubuntu 12.04 system when I run top:

Mem:   7785228k total,  1319304k used,  6465924k free,   103668k buffers

Solution

You can overcome this limitation by upgrading the host OS to a 64 bit version.

[Updated since it is now clear that both host and VM have PEA enabled]

It is you host OS (32-bit Ubuntu) which manages the memory. Your OS has PAE enabled, which means it (the host OS) can address up to 36 bits physical memory. However applications are still limited to 32 bit address space.

You can run multiple applications and (e.g. two programs using 3½ GB of RAM) on the host, but not single application which uses more than 4GB.

Your virtual box shell is a single application.

Comments

[David Schwartz]

Is PAE enabled in the host OS or the guest OS?

[Gulshan Goyal]

I enabled PAE with "Enable PAE/NX" setting, which determines whether the PAE and NX capabilities of the host CPU will be exposed to the virtual machine.

[David Schwartz]

Yeah, that won't help with giving the VM more memory. The host OS still can't access that memory, so it can't give it to the VM. You need a 64-bit host OS.

[Gulshan Goyal]

The host OS is accessing 8GB of memory just fine, but Virtualbox seems limited by configuration to 3584MB.

[David Schwartz]

I wonder if that's because the virtualbox application shell itself is 32-bits. A 32-bit application is limited to 4GB of virtual memory. This has nothing to do with PAE which affects physical memory limits, not virtual memory limits.

[David Schwartz]

Enabling PAE in the host would though, assuming memory ramapping is enabled by the BIOS.

[ganesh]

Aye.But I read (and still read) the question as PEA in the VM. Maybe the OP will clarify this in the morning.

[David Schwartz]

We now it means that the VM has access to PAE/NX. So that won't help it use more memory.

[ganesh]

Apparently Ubuntu (12) now comes with PAE enabled as a default. So both host (32bit) and VM (64 bit) should be able to see it. However PAE in a 64bit VM makes no sense. But 8GB is available to virtual box. I need to think this over. (Note that upgrading the host to 64 bit should still solve this and will add other features, such as allowing more registers in the CPU to be used. I still think that is the 'right' way to solve it, but now what OP asked.)

[David Schwartz]

PAE makes sense in a 64-bit VM because without PAE enabled, you can't use NX, which 64-bit OSes definitely do use.

[Gulshan Goyal]

@Hennes: this is exactly my situation. I was therefore thinking that there must be a way to make this work.

[trpt4him]

I can speak from experience on this-- I have had to reinstall the 64 bit version of a host OS because of this, even with PAE enabled and the host seeing 8GB. It seems upgrading to a 64 bit host is the "official" VBox stance also virtualbox.org/ticket/10371

[Fenz]

Hypervisors aren't limited in memory size on 32 bit hosts and can provide more than 4GB of RAM to guests. frank (the guy who closed the bug on vbox bugtracker) is well known for his sensitive nature who takes any bug report as questioning his professionalism. He is ignoring all the bugs there and banning submitters.