Memory reported to guest OS is wrong when using balooning

Apps and Virtualization
1

So I have a pretty vanilla Alpine Linux as guest and I’ve allocated it 11GB memory. Now, when also using min memory set (i.e. 256MB) then the guest OS would report total 11GB memory and almost all of it as used (while the host correctly allocated only ~2GB). This is not the case when not setting min memory (and thus disabling balooning AFAIK) where the memory usage report on guest OS is as expected and host allocates 11GB.

This balooning effect might be an issue, because guest OS thinks it doesn’t have free memory and will swap instead. Is there something I can do to enable balooning working correctly?

TIA

2

This is how ballooning works.

A memory balloon is inflated in the guest os.

Incus may have the ability to hot plug memory.

3

If I understand your correctly, one needs guest OS support for balooning to work properly? Otherwise it is what I see?