0007602: Popping Balloons (in 2022.1) - Kali Linux Bug Tracker

ID	Project	Category	View Status	Date Submitted	Last Update
0007602	Kali Linux	General Bug	public	2022-02-27 21:25	2022-02-28 07:24

Reporter	max06	Assigned To	daniruiz
Priority	high	Severity	major	Reproducibility	always
Status	closed	Resolution	duplicate
Product Version	2022.1

Summary	0007602: Popping Balloons (in 2022.1)
Description	A default Kali installation (or the live cd) in a virtual machine on hyper-v starts eating up all available memory shortly after logging in into xfce. The consumption only shows in the hyper-v console, not in the guest itself. It stops when the max. configured memory is reached. This might be 1TB of ram on a fresh vm without configuration changes, which basically breaks everything. Dynamic memory needs to be enabled for this (by default).
Steps To Reproduce	Create a new Hyper-V VM. (Recommendation: Don't use quick create.) I went with Generation 2 1GB initial memory with dynamic memory active the default switch a new Harddrive (5Gb) which won't be used and the kali live cd image as boot device You can also install Kali with the default options, it won't change the result. Before you start the instance: Edit its properties, disable secure boot and set a reasonable memory limit (16Gb here). Watch the memory tab in the hyper-v manager once the instance booted. It might take 2-3 minutes for the data to show up. You won't see the consumed memory in the guest itself. If the issue is reproducable: The memory balloon with grow and ultimately block your system once swapping starts.
Additional Information	When you run the instance without configuring a lower memory limit (overprovisioning), it will eventually create log entries about unhandled hv_ballooning events. Those happen so rapidly, they wrote 70GB of logs here in less than 20 minutes. I tested the same scenario with an ubuntu live cd, it doesn't happen there. Also the rate of updates about the memory usage for the hypervisor is way faster, like one per second. With kali, it's something between 30s and a minute. The effect only starts after being logged in. There's no difference if it's the regular console of the extended thingie with xrdp. Logging out/closing the console has no effect.

Date Modified	Username	Field	Change
2022-02-27 21:25	max06	New Issue
2022-02-27 21:25	max06	Issue generated from: 0007552
2022-02-27 21:25	max06	Relationship added	related to 0007552
2022-02-28 07:24	daniruiz	Assigned To	=> daniruiz
2022-02-28 07:24	daniruiz	Status	new => closed
2022-02-28 07:24	daniruiz	Resolution	open => duplicate
2022-02-28 07:24	daniruiz	Relationship replaced	duplicate of 0007552