VirtualBox on Fedora showing not enough memory to start VM error!

Applications
1

I’ve been using Fedora KDE spin for a couple of weeks now and am really enjoying it. I’ve run into an issue with Virtual Box that I never seen on Ubuntu. I’ll try to launch a VM and Virtual Box will give me an error telling me that there isn’t enough memory.

System monitor tells me there’s plenty of free RAM. free -m tells me a lot of RAM is tied up by cache which isn’t a bad thing but VirtualBox cannot reserve a continuous block RAM for the virtual machine.

A little Googling led me to a command to clear the memory cache:

sudo sh -c 'sync; echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches'

That does the trick. I’ve added an alias in my bashrc:

alias cachedrop="sudo sh -c 'sync; echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches'"

The alias makes things easier; Now it’s just a minor annoyance. I figured if someone else ran into this issue it may help.

Does anyone have suggestions for permanently fixing this? I’m trying to allocate 6GB of RAM for a W10 VM. The computer that I’m seeing the issue on has 16 GB of RAM total.

3 Likes
2

Does that message mean

  • not enough real ram… which would be nonsense
  • not enough space allocated when you set limits to memory for the virtual machine

I dont use Vbox, I use virt -manager and I get a messagd like that if I dont allow enough virtual ram to instsll the OS

2 Likes
3

I use Gnome Boxes, which allows 20G for a virtual installation. Sometimes I have to increase that for specific distros, but not often. Some distros won’t succeed, but it’s usually a UEFI issue and I just drop it and move on.

2 Likes
4

Yes, I have unending trouble with UEFI in VM’s. Legacy boot works much more reliably.
Does anyone understand what it is about UEFI that makes its use with VM’s so difficult?

3 Likes
5

I second your question–what is the reason for the shift from legacy boot to UEFI? I thought that was strictly a Windows thing? Does anyone have an answer?

2 Likes
6

I think it is all about running out of space in the MBR. They needed to shift that MBR stuff to a bigger space so they chose to use an EFI system file (which can be any size) instead if a fixed 512k on the first sector of the disk.

VM’s are supposed to be able to emulate MBR or UEFI.
I do know that if you use UEFI you need to make an EFI partition in the virtual filesystem.
Some live isos require uefi. Some installers force you into uefi.

2 Likes