How can I fix MACOS ram usage is too high?

[pilgrimage]

I'm running the Mac os operating system on a VM with GPU Passthough. However, in the Mac summary, 32GB ram seems to be using close to 100%. What could be the reason for this? Do I need to do anything on mac for Guest Agent Virtio?

thankyou.

 

[datschlatscher]

Proxmox tries to allocate only as much as RAM as a VM currently needs through the help of the ballooning driver. While Linux has them by default, and Windows needs them to be installed through the Qemu Guest driver, I couldn't find much info whether there are any (native) ones for Mac OS.

Nonetheless, using PCI Passthrough means that the VM will automatically use 100% of the assigned RAM because the hardware (drivers) might randomly access parts of the RAM that would be potentially unmapped.
From what I understand, even with ballooning drivers, mapped memory would never be released and quickly fill up. E.g. when tested by the OS at startup.

 

[LnxBil]

Please keep also in mind, that something like free memory does not exist and the OS will work hard to be fast so free memory is always used to cache as much as it can.

 

[mav2287]

Sorry for the late reply but wanted to leave this here for others that run into this.

I think this happens because macOS doesn't have a balloon driver. I ran into the same thing where OS X always shows 100% memory usage. In my adventures with OS X on prox mox I ended up writing my own guest agent and as a result accidentally fixed this issue (at least it's fixed on 9.1.6). The agent reports real memory usage through guest-get-memory-blocks and as far as I can tell Proxmox picks it up and shows actual usage instead of 100%.

Here is a link to the guest agent I wrote, https://github.com/mav2287/mac-guest-agent because it uses the serial driver built into OS X / macOS it should work on 10.4 Tiger up through Tahoe.