Pkg xen devel - Jul 2009 - Bug#520641: Cannot create HVM domain

This happens when there's not enough free memory to compensate the
memory overhead of domain creation, xend balloons down dom0 by 2MB
to work around this, but sometimes it's not enough.

Freeing more memory manually, or disabling ballooning of dom0
altogether (a good idea in any case) fixes it.

-- 
Romain Francoise <rfrancoise at debian.org>
http://people.debian.org/~rfrancoise/

Romain Francoise wrote:
> This happens when there's not enough free memory to compensate the
> memory overhead of domain creation, xend balloons down dom0 by 2MB
> to work around this, but sometimes it's not enough.
> 
> Freeing more memory manually, or disabling ballooning of dom0
> altogether (a good idea in any case) fixes it.
Sorry, freeing more memory where and how?  It's a 4GB machine with 960MB 
allocated to the current (PV) guests.

I have only the vaguest idea of what "ballooning" means (something to
do with
controlling the memory available to domains?), and no idea why it might be a bad
idea or how to turn it off.

If any of this is documented anywhere then I must have missed some important 
piece of documentation!

ttfn/rjk