[gentoo-user] Ram Problem!

[gentoo-user] Ram Problem!

[Teodor Spæren]

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Hello!

I am trying to install gentoo on an old armada m700. The specs that I think is relevant for this problem is the clocking speed of the cpu and the ram. It got 223mhz of clocking speed and 116mb ram. I have added 512mb of swap since I knew the ram was going to be a problem.

The command I issue is: "emerge gentoo-sources" and the output of the command is this: http://bpaste.net/raw/66293/

The only thing I can really read from the error message is that it runs out of ram. This surprises me because all it is really doing is moving the kernel sources into place? I asked around in #gentoo on irc.freenode.net and someone adviced me to turn of "MAKEOPTS="-j2" and "-pipe", but this doesn't fix it.

The possible work around I have thought of is just getting the vanilla kernel  from kernel.org, but the gentoo wiki advise against it, since gentoo-sources is a patched kernel.

This is my first post to a mailing list, so I hope it is not to bad! :D

With best regards,
   - TheRedMood 		 	   		  

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Re: [gentoo-user] Ram Problem!

[Jason Weisberger]

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There is absolutely no reason why you can't use the vanilla kernel.  Go
right ahead.
On Dec 24, 2012 10:08 AM, "Teodor Spæren" <teodor.spam@hotmail.com> wrote:

>  Hello!
>
> I am trying to install gentoo on an old armada m700. The specs that I
> think is relevant for this problem is the clocking speed of the cpu and the
> ram. It got 223mhz of clocking speed and 116mb ram. I have added 512mb of
> swap since I knew the ram was going to be a problem.
>
> The command I issue is: "emerge gentoo-sources" and the output of the
> command is this: http://bpaste.net/raw/66293/
>
> The only thing I can really read from the error message is that it runs
> out of ram. This surprises me because all it is really doing is moving the
> kernel sources into place? I asked around in #gentoo on irc.freenode.netand someone adviced me to turn of "MAKEOPTS="-j2" and "-pipe", but this
> doesn't fix it.
>
> The possible work around I have thought of is just getting the vanilla
> kernel  from kernel.org, but the gentoo wiki advise against it, since
> gentoo-sources is a patched kernel.
>
> This is my first post to a mailing list, so I hope it is not to bad! :D
>
> With best regards,
>    - TheRedMood
>

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RE: [gentoo-user] Ram Problem!

[Teodor Spæren]

Ohh! Thanks a lot :) Still it would have been useful to know what was causing it to go out of memory.
 		 	   		  

[gentoo-user] Re: Ram Problem!

[Nuno J. Silva]

On 2012-12-24, Teodor Spæren wrote:

> Hello!
>
> I am trying to install gentoo on an old armada m700. The specs that I
> think is relevant for this problem is the clocking speed of the cpu
> and the ram. It got 223mhz of clocking speed and 116mb ram. I have
> added 512mb of swap since I knew the ram was going to be a problem.
>
> The command I issue is: "emerge gentoo-sources" and the output of the
> command is this: http://bpaste.net/raw/66293/
>
> The only thing I can really read from the error message is that it
> runs out of ram. This surprises me because all it is really doing is
> moving the kernel sources into place? I asked around in #gentoo on
> irc.freenode.net and someone adviced me to turn of "MAKEOPTS="-j2" and
> "-pipe", but this doesn't fix it.

No surprise here, from what I can see, what's happening is that *emerge*
is running out of memory, it's not a compilation, so -pipe or MAKEOPTS
won't make any difference here. Are you, by any chance, running anything
else on the machine, or maybe you forgot to enable the swap? 

Even then, unless emerge has changed a lot in the last few years, I
doubt you need that much memory to have emerge copy files to /. But
check the output of "free -m" or something like that to check whether 1)
there's something else using a lot of memory and 2) the swap is
effectiely enabled.

> The possible work around I have thought of is just getting the vanilla
> kernel from kernel.org, but the gentoo wiki advise against it, since
> gentoo-sources is a patched kernel.

You can install the vanilla kernel, I think you can even use emerge for
that, but I also think your problem here is with emerge running out of
memory, not gentoo-sources being incompatible. I'd try to fix whatever
the emerge issue is as it will probably prevent you from installing
other packages, and that is effectively a major issue when you want to
use the system.


> This is my first post to a mailing list, so I hope it is not to bad!
> :D
>
> With best regards,
>    - TheRedMood 		 	   		  

-- 
Nuno Silva (aka njsg)
http://njsg.sdf-eu.org/

RE: [gentoo-user] Re: Ram Problem!

[Teodor Spæren]

> From: nunojsilva@ist.utl.pt
> Subject: [gentoo-user] Re: Ram Problem!
> Date: Mon, 24 Dec 2012 17:32:54 +0200

> No surprise here, from what I can see, what's happening is that *emerge*
> is running out of memory, it's not a compilation, so -pipe or MAKEOPTS
> won't make any difference here. Are you, by any chance, running anything
> else on the machine, or maybe you forgot to enable the swap?

No, I am running a cli only liverescuecd. There is nothing that should take much swap.

> Even then, unless emerge has changed a lot in the last few years, I
> doubt you need that much memory to have emerge copy files to /. But
> check the output of "free -m" or something like that to check whether 1)
> there's something else using a lot of memory and 2) the swap is
> effectiely enabled.
Output of free -m:
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           116         41         75          0          2         14
-/+ buffers/cache:         23         92
Swap:          486        153        332
> You can install the vanilla kernel, I think you can even use emerge for
> that, but I also think your problem here is with emerge running out of
> memory, not gentoo-sources being incompatible. I'd try to fix whatever
> the emerge issue is as it will probably prevent you from installing
> other packages, and that is effectively a major issue when you want to
> use the system.
That is my concern. If I get it working with a vanilla kernel, and then booting into the system,
emerge do not work, it was all wasted.

With best regards,
    - TheRedMood
 		 	   		  

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Ram Problem!

[Bruce Hill]

On Mon, Dec 24, 2012 at 04:52:27PM +0100, Teodor Spæren wrote:
> 
> That is my concern. If I get it working with a vanilla kernel, and then booting into the system,
> emerge do not work, it was all wasted.

You may want to consider a swap file:

http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-add-a-swap-file-howto/

NB: I don't know how well it's going to help with Gentoo. It's been close to a
decade, if not longer, since I've used a machine with such limits, and we only
installed binary system to them. There is tinderbox for Gentoo, if that would
help any at all: http://tinderbox.dev.gentoo.org/
-- 
Happy Penguin Computers               >')
126 Fenco Drive                       ( \
Tupelo, MS 38801                       ^^
support@happypenguincomputers.com
662-269-2706 662-205-6424
http://happypenguincomputers.com/

Don't top-post: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_post#Top-posting

RE: [gentoo-user] Re: Ram Problem!

[Teodor Spæren]

> You may want to consider a swap file:
>
> http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-add-a-swap-file-howto/
I have already done this. I had some problems trying to compile gcc, so I learned it then.

> NB: I don't know how well it's going to help with Gentoo. It's been close to a
> decade, if not longer, since I've used a machine with such limits, and we only
> installed binary system to them. There is tinderbox for Gentoo, if that would
> help any at all: http://tinderbox.dev.gentoo.org/
I don't know what tinderbox is, but I'll have to look it up. I thought that gentoo would be perfect for such an old system,
except for the long compile times :3

> With all due respect, Gentoo is the only distro using a Gentoo patched kernel.
> It's not really necessary, and NONE of the 8 comps in our shop runs any of the
> gentoo provided kernel sources. Just get the kernel.org of your choice and:
Yeah, that is what I thought! After doing an LFS install, I don't even know the benefit of the patched kernel.
>
> Change the version for whichever one you desire.
Thanks :) I use curl, but I guess it is the same with some command diffrence.

It seems that I have gotten the general idea. Since there are non who really can give me a reason it won't work
I will go for a vanilla kernel. Thanks so much for the helpful answers.

With best regards,
    - TheRedMood
 		 	   		  

Re: [gentoo-user] Ram Problem!

[Bruce Hill]

On Mon, Dec 24, 2012 at 04:05:44PM +0100, Teodor Spæren wrote:
> 
> The possible work around I have thought of is just getting the vanilla kernel  from kernel.org, but the gentoo wiki advise against it, since gentoo-sources is a patched kernel.

With all due respect, Gentoo is the only distro using a Gentoo patched kernel.
It's not really necessary, and NONE of the 8 comps in our shop runs any of the
gentoo provided kernel sources. Just get the kernel.org of your choice and:

mingdao@baruch ~/kernel $ wget http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v3.0/linux-3.4.24.tar.bz2

Change the version for whichever one you desire.
-- 
Happy Penguin Computers               >')
126 Fenco Drive                       ( \
Tupelo, MS 38801                       ^^
support@happypenguincomputers.com
662-269-2706 662-205-6424
http://happypenguincomputers.com/

Don't top-post: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_post#Top-posting

[gentoo-user] Re: Ram Problem!

[Nikos Chantziaras]

On 24/12/12 17:05, Teodor Spæren wrote:
> It got 223mhz of clocking speed and 116mb ram. I have added
> 512mb of swap since I knew the ram was going to be a problem.

I would forget about it.  It was possible in the days of GCC 3 and 2.95.

Unless you don't care that emerging a complete system will take a week 
(or more).

Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Ram Problem!

[Pandu Poluan]

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On Dec 25, 2012 4:14 PM, "Nikos Chantziaras" <realnc@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 24/12/12 17:05, Teodor Spæren wrote:
>>
>> It got 223mhz of clocking speed and 116mb ram. I have added
>> 512mb of swap since I knew the ram was going to be a problem.
>
>
> I would forget about it.  It was possible in the days of GCC 3 and 2.95.
>
> Unless you don't care that emerging a complete system will take a week
(or more).
>
>

... or, cross-compile the binaries somewhere else and feed it the resulting
binary packages...

Rgds,
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Re: [gentoo-user] Ram Problem!

[Paul Hartman]

On Mon, Dec 24, 2012 at 9:05 AM, Teodor Spæren <teodor.spam@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Hello!
>
> I am trying to install gentoo on an old armada m700. The specs that I think
> is relevant for this problem is the clocking speed of the cpu and the ram.
> It got 223mhz of clocking speed and 116mb ram. I have added 512mb of swap
> since I knew the ram was going to be a problem.
>
> The command I issue is: "emerge gentoo-sources" and the output of the
> command is this: http://bpaste.net/raw/66293/
>
> The only thing I can really read from the error message is that it runs out
> of ram. This surprises me because all it is really doing is moving the
> kernel sources into place? I asked around in #gentoo on irc.freenode.net and
> someone adviced me to turn of "MAKEOPTS="-j2" and "-pipe", but this doesn't
> fix it.

And in the case of this sources package, I think nothing is being
compiled anyway. It simply unpacks, patches and copies the files to
/usr/src/xxxxx so I don't think either of those options ever come into
play.

You can manually emerge using the "ebuild" command, would be
interesting to see if it makes any difference. Could be some RAM usage
by emerge is just too much for your system.

You may need to use ulimit to keep python from using too much RAM when
you run emerge.

Do you have any daemons running in the background? Could you disable
any to free up more RAM as a test?

I think you will need even more than 512mb swap to be honest, I have a
server with 256mb of RAM and have to use 1gb of swap or else I get out
of memory conditions on occasion. I think you want 1gb or more if it
is possible.

In this case because it's out of memory while copying files, I wonder
if some of sysctl vm.* options will have influence. Kernel sources
have thousands of files and maybe I/O is not fast enough.

I use nice and ionice to make emerge running at the lowest priority
(meaning the least important)

> The possible work around I have thought of is just getting the vanilla
> kernel  from kernel.org, but the gentoo wiki advise against it, since
> gentoo-sources is a patched kernel.

You can use vanilla, no problems. Please review the genpatches patch
set and determine if you use/need any of the Gentoo patches:
https://dev.gentoo.org/~mpagano/genpatches/

You can also manually apply this patchset to vanilla if you like, of course.

Good luck and welcome to the list! :)