How do you turn off the inactive ram facility within OSX?

Hi There,

I have a problem with OSX where I am trying to use Virtualbox to load a Solaris instance and a Oracle VDI. The problem is that guest OS sees the inactive RAM as being used and unavailable.

is there a way of turning off the inactive RAM feature within OSX?

Please help!

Martin

First off, don't mess around with memory management in OS X. It's one of those things that is best left to the OS to manage. Second, once you start a VM, the memory that you set for it in VB will be allocated to it and inactive memory will be used if need be. I say this because, as Apple notes, inactive memory will be allocated to another application if it's required.

If you want more memory for your virtual machine, then you need to head for settings in Virtualbox and adjust the amount of your memory you want to allow the VMs to use.

One other thing - if this VM is essential to your job (or something else) and you need to have a particular amount of RAM allocated to it, consider putting more RAM in your machine if you find yourself running low frequently.

inactive RAM reply

Hi There,

The problem is more that the Oracle VDI engine (OSX -> VBox -> Solaris + VDI) looks back at its host and looks at the RAM available to VBox. When the base OS does anything it just allocates the RAM to inactive (great for 99% of OSX life I guess). With this the VDI package on solaris gets worried that there is no free RAM in the host and throws a wobbler, hence can inactive RAM be turned off.

Thanks


Martin

Technically Solaris or any guest OS doesn't and shouldn't know that it's operating in a virtual environment within VirtualBox or any other software..they just use the amount of RAM allocated to it..

Should the guest OS use up all the allocated memory and OS X wants to allocate more but there is no more free RAM then it might start swapping to the HD..

Regards