memory seen by a _service_ VM is different than set in Dom0

[joanna]

free -m shows larger amount of memory than set via qvm-pref, and reported by qvm-ls.

[rafal]

This looks like the kernel bug. Affects not only servicevms.
This is "fixed" by qmemman doing xl memset. That is why it is not visible in normal appvms. However, if I "xl start" an appvm manually with init=/bin/bash, there is a similar difference visible as well.

I think simply the memory amount reported by /proc/meminfo is miscalculated. If I do

xl memset firewallvm 199
xl memset firewallvm 200

then there is no change in xen free memory (or vms memory), but the meminfo shows 200 correctly then.

It can be worked around by adding

MEMKB=$(grep Current /proc/xen/balloon|sed -e 's/ kB//' -e 's/.* //')
echo $((($MEMKB-1)*1024)) > /proc/xen/balloon

somewhere in a VM init.d script. Or do we want to file a ticket for suse folks and wait for a clean solution ?

[joanna]

File a ticket (perhaps to xen-devel as well?). Moving this to Beta 3. Reducing this to minor (and perhaps we will move it to Beta 3, while waiting for the official fix).

[joanna]

It doesn't seem to harm anybody, and is strictly a Xen/kernel problem.