#9569 HIGH 1.5-F11: F11 yum

[Zarro Boogs per Child]

#9569: F11 yum
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           Reporter:  matei.tene       |       Owner:  cscott                           
               Type:  defect           |      Status:  new                              
           Priority:  high             |   Milestone:  1.5-F11                          
          Component:  upgrade utility  |     Version:  Development build as of this date
         Resolution:                   |    Keywords:  yum, F11, OS8, XO-1              
        Next_action:  diagnose         |    Verified:  0                                
Deployment_affected:                   |   Blockedby:                                   
           Blocking:                   |  
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Comment(by mikus):

 I'm a heavy user of yum, and have experience of yum problems, and what to
 do about them.

 The problem is that Sugar defines /var/cache/yum as a tmpfs.  On the XO-1
 (256 MB RAM), the size of /var/cache/yum ends up being 110 MB or less (use
 'df' to see the actual size).  This is too little for "big" yum
 transactions.  I always run my XOs with a swap partition, so that
 applications don't easily "run out of memory".  On the XO-1, I 'umount
 /var/cache/yum' -- that puts the yum cache into jffs2 rather than in a
 tmpfs.  [I'm willing to give up room in jffs2 because I've unloaded a lot
 of the executables I need to a "permanent" SD card.  But if having a huge
 /var/cache/yum in jffs2 is not acceptable, you can run 'yum clean all' to
 empty it out.]

 The problem is that yum keeps in /var/cache/yum an sqlite database of what
 packages are in each of the repositories.  [The sqlite for Fedora 11 base
 is 38 MB; for Fedora 11 updates it is 17 MB; plus smaller amounts for
 other repositories.]  What you have told yum to "install" needs to be
 first downloaded into /var/cache/yum as well.  It is likely that you do
 not have enough room left in /var/cache/yum for your "big" yum transaction
 to download all the packages you instructed it to fetch.

 The problem gets much worse for certain situations, where yum needs to
 fetch additional sqlite databases of the *content* of each package in the
 repositories.  For Fedora 11 base alone, those additional sqlite files
 would take up 89 MB in /var/cache/yum.  You can see where the 110 MB tmpfs
 for XO-1 just isn't enough.

 That said, I've been able to run "big" yum without difficulty on the XO-1,
 where it had to install 60 - 90 packages in one swoop.  [But both the
 'umount /var/cache/yum' and the swap partition were needed to make it
 possible.]

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 The "too small tmpfs size" is not a problem on the XO-1.5, since there
 tmpfs allocation is more than 400 MB.

-- 
Ticket URL: <http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/9569#comment:1>
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