Error Starting VM

[comfox]

Hello All,

 

I have been running my Windows 10 VM for 2 days and 1 hour and it hard crashed in the background while I was connected to it via RDP.  I didn't see the crash, just went back to the RDP window and the connection was closed.

 

I am now trying to start the VM back up but I am getting this an error.

 

internal error: process exited while connecting to monitor: 2016-03-21T17:56:23.546456Z qemu-system-x86_64: cannot set up guest memory 'pc.ram': Cannot allocate memory

 

Anyone know what that means?

 

VM Log

2016-03-19 15:30:12.644+0000: starting up libvirt version: 1.2.18, qemu version: 2.3.0
Domain id=1 is tainted: high-privileges
Domain id=1 is tainted: custom-argv
Domain id=1 is tainted: host-cpu
char device redirected to /dev/pts/0 (label charserial0)
2016-03-21 17:34:44.261+0000: shutting down
2016-03-21 17:56:02.640+0000: starting up libvirt version: 1.2.18, qemu version: 2.3.0
Domain id=2 is tainted: high-privileges
Domain id=2 is tainted: custom-argv
Domain id=2 is tainted: host-cpu
char device redirected to /dev/pts/0 (label charserial0)
2016-03-21T17:56:02.680486Z qemu-system-x86_64: cannot set up guest memory 'pc.ram': Cannot allocate memory
2016-03-21 17:56:02.845+0000: shutting down
2016-03-21 17:56:23.507+0000: starting up libvirt version: 1.2.18, qemu version: 2.3.0
Domain id=3 is tainted: high-privileges
Domain id=3 is tainted: custom-argv
Domain id=3 is tainted: host-cpu
char device redirected to /dev/pts/0 (label charserial0)
2016-03-21T17:56:23.546456Z qemu-system-x86_64: cannot set up guest memory 'pc.ram': Cannot allocate memory
2016-03-21 17:56:23.711+0000: shutting down

[comfox]

So I found an old thread (https://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=42211.0) that said this could be caused my no not enough memory which shouldn't be a problem for me since I have 16GB of RAM installed. 

 

I checked on the 'Dashboard' page and saw my 'Memory usage' at 20% committed.  That seemed high considering I was doing nothing.  So I was thinking the KVM manager didn't release the memory properly so I found a website (http://www.upubuntu.com/2013/01/how-to-free-up-unused-memory-in.html) that suggested running these commands to free up memory

 

sudo sysctl -w vm.drop_caches=3

 

and

 

sudo sync && echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

 

While I have no clue what they do, they successfully lowered my 'Memory usage' on the Dashboard to 13%. 

 

I clicked on the VM to start it and poof, it worked.

 

Guess you mark this as resolved and maybe sticky this or add this knowledge to an FAQ on how to fix that specific error.

 

Cheers!