Anaconda installs OOM with selinux-policy-targeted rpm from F9 updates

[Dave Jones]

On Fri, Nov 07, 2008 at 01:13:38AM -0500, Martin Langhoff wrote:
 > One the last rounds of testing the new release of OLPCXS, I rebuilt it
 > with fresh packages from F9 update and started testing the installer.
 > Funny thing, the install did not complete -- instead, the machine
 > would switch off after spending a few minutes trying to install
 > selinux-policy-targeted.
 > 
 > After a few attempts to diagnose the problem, I managed to see vmstat
 > go all the way down to almost 0 memory just before the machine turned
 > itself off. This particular machine has ~980MB RAM available to the
 > OS. Tested on another machine with a proper 1GB memory, vmstat hit
 > bottom at ~10MB free while installing selinux-policy-targeted but
 > quickly recovered.
 > 
 > I know I've installed earlier F9 based spins on machines with 512 MB
 > of physical RAM so this seems like a fairly bad regression, specially
 > considering that I'll soon need to install this on a machine with
 > 256MB RAM.
 > 
 > So I suspect we have 2 problems
 > 
 >  - Selinux-policy-targeted instalation seems to have balooned into a
 > memory hog between f9-release and f9-updates
 > 
 >  - Anaconda OOMs without a warning or useful message to the user
 > 
 > Has anyone else seen this? Diagnostics to recommend? I can
 > successfully log anything to disk until moments before the OOM
 > shutdown.

Did you configure any swap ?
If no, then there's really not much that we can do if something
uses more than available system RAM.

If you did, it might be interesting to try (from tty2)
echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/would_have_oomkilled

That will prevent the actually 'killing', but will still
log all the same output that the oomkiller would have spewed.
It might be interesting to see that output.

If you're drastically low enough on memory to invoke an OOM kill
though, setting that sysctl may just mean the system livelocks.

	Dave

-- 
http://www.codemonkey.org.uk