I read the following article: https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2010/07/17/virtio-balloon/
I understand how it works, what I dont understand what its actually useful for. I set it up on my win10 vm, and it behaves as expected, I can shrink and expand the available memory inside the guest. But I don’t see any way to use / access it from my host. So whats its use? (or did I do something wrong?)
It’s supposed to free memory for the host to use, and the kernel is supposed to free it. I’ve had instances where this freeing process doesn’t happen, so you may be experiencing this.
I can’t offer help at the moment (I’m out right now), but I wanted to comment to let you know that it is an abnormal situation.
However, this shouldn’t be used on a passthrough vm. It causes instability and stuttering in games.
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In a vmware world, it works well in terms of overnight batch and test environments. IE memory overcommit.
If all you ‘playing’ with a homelab, you’ll come to love it 