After following the instruction at Clear Linux* OS on Microsoft Hyper-V, the VM is running. However, I have noticed the dynamic memory is partially broken. The VM is able to reduce down the memory, but, it is not able to expand beyond the initial starting memory.
For example, the setting I have is:
RAM: 4096 (initial starting memory)
Minimum RAM: 1024
Maximum RAM: 16384
I can see the memory properly reduce (from Hyper-V Manager) to lower value. However, it fails to increase the memory.
The host is running Windows Server 2019. The error message I see from journalctl is:
kernel: hv_balloon: Memory hot add failed
I have tried this with the following images:
clear-32310-hyperv
clear-32550-hyperv
I also manually install the kernel-hyperv-lts which is running 4.19.108-249. I have also tried with and without the os-cloudguest-azure.
I do see based on the /usr/lib/kernel/config-*.hyperv, the kernel is configured with:
The current workaround to the problem is start the VM with Maximum memory. However, this is not how dynamic memory should work and this will run into issue when multiple VM starts simultaneously.
Did this work in earlier releases? I doubt we have any significant kernel patches for this feature - this might be a pure upstream bug. I would recommend reporting the issue upstream, therefore.
I have tried these 2 releases:
clear-32310-hyperv
clear-32550-hyperv
I have also tried CentOS 7, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, with various kernel versions (3.10, 4.19, 5.0), all of them work properly. Given kernel-hyperv-lts is also 4.19 and didn’t work, it may point to ClearLinux?
Windows Server 2019 is the Hyper-V host.
Minimum mem at 512MB, Maximum mem at 6144MB, and Startup mem at 2048MB
Processor is an Intel® Xeon® E-2176G.
Currently at:
user@mercury~ $ swupd info
Distribution: Clear Linux OS
Installed version: 32870
Version URL: https://cdn.download.clearlinux.org/update
Content URL: https://cdn.download.clearlinux.org/update
user@mercury~ $ uname -a
Linux mercury 5.6.4-281.hyperv #2 SMP Mon Apr 13 06:07:35 PDT 2020 x86_64 GNU/Linux
I observe similar that the VM is able to reduce its allocation from the startup size when demand is low, but it is unable to increase beyond the startup size even though the maximum is much larger. The only message is same as above:
Apr 19 18:00:01 mercury kernel: hv_balloon: Memory hot add failed
There were no Hyper-V host errors logged around this time.
Other linux distros with different kernels are able to freely balloon up and down as needed based on demand.