Yum random crashes in XO4 f20 images

[Peter Robinson]

Hi Martin,

> I am have been building a Fedora 20 image for the XO4, and I am seeing
> memory corruption problems while running yum in these images (please check
> the logs [1,2]).

The logs don't mean anything to me. What device are you running it on,
how much memory, do you have swap enabled?

> To give you some context, we are using olpc-os-builder (master [3]) with
> fc20 repositories plus a few hand-crafted packages such as the kernel,
> systemd and xorg, taken from previous Daniel Narvaez efforts [4,5].
>
> These crashes happens randomly when yum is running, by calling yum update or
> when olpc-os-build is installing system packages.

Yum isn't the most memory friendly, and some of the post update
scripts aren't either, you need to make sure there's enough
memory/swap.

> James Cameron, who spent some time researching about this issue, speculates
> that this problem could be caused by: (a) using older kernel that was
> compiled (possibly) with different options compared to f20's, or (b) a
> faulty glibc library.
>
> I was wondering if this could be related to something else, something more
> specific to  yum or python arm binaries (?).

Unlikely, I've not seen issues elsewhere. But I need more details.

> I would sincerely appreciate any guidance you can provide to start
> discarding possibilities and try to debug this issue.
>
> Thanks in advance for any help you can provide!

What version of OOB are you using, and what config files? I can try
and recreate the problem here on other devices.

Peter