qemukvmlibvirt

Why would the RAM amount reported by a KVM/QEMU guest OS not match the libvirt configuration?


I'm using manually built QEMU and libvirt packages to do malware analysis, and I'm running into a problem where Windows 10 64 bit only sees 2 GB of RAM on a VM configured with a Q35 chipset and 4 GB of RAM.

Windows 7 64 bit only sees 3 GB of RAM on a VM configured with an i440FX chipset and current and maximum amount of RAM set to 4 GB.

This happens with or without the virtio balloon driver installed (I'd prefer it to not have any virtio drivers installed, to make it harder to identify the system as a VM.

The host system has 64 GB of RAM.

Any idea what's going wrong?


Solution

  • Turns out the issue was caused by a bad anti-detection patch to seabios

    https://github.com/kevoreilly/CAPEv2/issues/1618