[Server-devel] Anaconda installs OOM with selinux-policy-targeted rpm from F9 updates

[Martin Langhoff]

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.

Will post version numbers of the selinux rpm tomorrow when I get back
in front of the offending machine and installer image. Apologies for
the vagueness :-)

cheers,



m
-- 
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 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
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