From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20030225 Description of problem: If one installs Severn on a Dell XPS T550 system with 2 hard drives, 512 Mb of installed memory, a low memory warning appears immediately after partitioning hard drive /dev/hdb (which I chose to install on).Memory warning seems to be bogus. I am warned that memory is low and swap needs to be activated immediately. I'm asked to agree to this. If I click 'yes' or OK, installation proceeds normally. I also notice that even though I selected /dev/hdb as the only allowable drive for partitioning, the autopartition feature wants to format the swap partition on /dev/hda. I've never noticed that before. When I got the low memory warning, I switched to virtual terminal 2 and issued 'cat /proc/meminfo'. Results: total used free mem 527585280 143790080 283795200 Memtotal: 515220 kb Memfree: 374800 kb SwapTotal: 0 SwapFree: 0 I've been able to reproduce this issue in each of 2 installs. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Insert CD#1 in CD drive, boot to CD 2. Linux askmethod, then select NFS image as installation method 3. Fresh installation, select Workstation install. 4. My system has 2 hard drives, hda and hdb. Install to hdb. 5. Select autopartition, and check the box for reviewing. 6. Edit the default /boot partition to increase the size from 100 Mb to 400 Mb. 7. Click Next button. 8. Low memory warning window appears at this point. Actual Results: I was issued a low memory warning. Installation proceeded normally. Expected Results: The low memory warning should not have appeared. This system has 512 Mb. Additional info:
Can you switch to tty2 and look at the contents of /proc/meminfo to make sure all of your memory is being recognized?
By 'switch to tty2' I assume you mean press CTRL-ALT-F2. I did that and ran 'cat /proc/meminfo' and I do believe all my memory is being recognized. This example is taken from a terminal window, not tty2, because I know I can copy and paste the large amount of text: total: used: free: shared: buffers: cached: Mem: 526966784 155541504 371425280 0 10600448 77877248 Swap: 2146746368 0 2146746368 MemTotal: 514616 kB MemFree: 362720 kB MemShared: 0 kB Buffers: 10352 kB Cached: 76052 kB SwapCached: 0 kB Active: 39980 kB Inactive: 94752 kB HighTotal: 0 kB HighFree: 0 kB LowTotal: 514616 kB LowFree: 362720 kB SwapTotal: 2096432 kB SwapFree: 2096432 kB [cochranb@bobc cochranb]$ The values on tty2 are similar except they show more memory free. I'll try to add those in another comment.
Well, the values on tty2 did show more memory free; they show less now, I presume because I have Mozilla running. Here we are: total: used: free: shared: buffers: cached: Mem: 526966784 221741056 305225728 0 12156928 123277312 Swap: 2146746368 0 2146746368 MemTotal: 514616 kB MemFree: 298072 kB MemShared: 0 kB Buffers: 11872 kB Cached: 120388 kB SwapCached: 0 kB Active: 44168 kB Inactive: 153136 kB HighTotal: 0 kB HighFree: 0 kB LowTotal: 514616 kB LowFree: 298072 kB SwapTotal: 2096432 kB SwapFree: 2096432 kB [cochranb@bobc cochranb]$
Please try an install again and at the point the low memory screen appears, look at /proc/meminfo. Also look in /tmp and /tmp/ramfs and see (with the ls -l command) if there are any really HUGE files.
Okay, I'll do this the night of July 31. I had to make a new CD #1 and things got a bit confused tonight.
I went through the install procedure again as requested. I'm going to present more exactly what I did, in addition to supplying you the information you requested. At the screen which searches for Red Hat Linux installations, I selected "Install Red Hat Linux" rather than an upgrade. Selected Workstation installation type. Selected Automatically partition. Selected "Remove all partitions on this system", and checked "hdb 24403 MB IBM-DJNA-352500" as the only allowable drive. Selected the "Review" button to review the partitioning scheme. Clicked "yes" to the warning box that asked if I want to remove all data on /dev/hdb. At this point I could see the partitions on my system. I noticed that /dev/hda7 the swap partition was selected for formatting. (But I don't want the hda drive touched. Nevertheless, I left the checkmark for formatting in place.) Edited /dev/hdb1 mounted on /boot from 102 Mb in size to 400. Clicked next and this window popped up: "As you don't have much memory in this machine, we need to turn on swap space immediately. To do this we'll have to write your partition table to the disk immediately. Is that OK?" At this point I switched to tty2 and ran 'cat /proc/meminfo' as requested above. It recognizes all my memory, but notice it doesn't recognize any swap space: total used free Mem: 527585280 144052224 383533056 MemTotal 515220 MemFree 374544 Memshared 0 Buffers 16044 Cached 83272 SwapCached 0 Active 23524 Inactive 99428 HighTotal 0 HighFree 0 LowTotal 515220 LowFree 374544 SwapTotal 0 SwapFree 0 You requested that I look in /tmp and /tmp/ramfs with the ls -l command if there are any really huge files present. I did this, there are no huge files. There are files present but they all seem normally sized (< 100,000 bytes which I can't call huge.) Hope this helps. Bob Cochran
Thanks for trying that. Here is something else you can try if you have time. At the point where you get the out of memory warning, got VC2 and try this (you'll need a floppy handy). All data on the floppy will be erased. On VC2 type: mformat a: mcopy /tmp/*.log a: Then append all the log files it copied to the floppy to this bug report as separate attachments. That will give us alot more information.
Created attachment 93303 [details] anaconda.log from /tmp Per your request
Created attachment 93304 [details] X.log per your request Per your request. There were 2 total files copied to the diskette, and 2 total files attached in response to this request.
Thanks for those files. Here is something else you may try: 1) Get to the point you've received the low memory warning 2) Goto VC2 3) Enter: PYTHONPATH=/usr/lib/anaconda python import iutil print iutil.memAvailable() That will print out a number, which should be the number of KB of RAM available.
I'll show my output after I typed PYTHONPATH=/usr/lib/anaconda python. Python 2.2.3 (#1, Jun 10 2003, 16:41:13) [GCC 3.3 20030604 (Red Hat Linux 3.3-5)] on linux2 Type "help", "copyright", "credits", or "license" for more information. >>> import iutil >>> print iutil.memAvailable() -157780 >>> (At this point I pressed CTRL-D to exit.) Hope this helped.
Yeah that helped - it thinks you have a negative amount of memory... I appreciate your help debugging this. If you don't mind, I'm adding an attachment to this bug. Please put this file on a floppy (DOS formatted). When you boot the installer use 'linux updates'. Insert the floppy when asked for the updates floppy. After you get the 'Low Memory' warning, mcopy the /tmp/anaconda.log file onto a floppy and append to this bug.
Created attachment 93457 [details] iutil.py file with debugging information
This got a bit confusing for me. I followed your directions, formatting a floppy disk under Windows XP (as a FAT filesystem) and copying iutil.py to it. When prompted for an updates disk, I put it in the drive and got this message: Error: failed to mount updates disk Then I decided to format the disk using gfloppy. It formatted fine but afterwards I got this frustrating 'only root can do that' message when attempting to mount /dev/fd0. Switching to root, I couldn't mount the floppy either: it complained about a bad superblock...etc. So, while still root I finally formatted the floppy as ext3 using /sbin/mkfs.ext3. I can mount the disk as an ordinary user but then could not write iutil.py to it. I wrote the file as root. This time, anaconda was able to read the updates disk. Also this time, a 'low memory' warning did NOT appear. I have been doing this installation as an NFS image installation using 'linux askmethod', remember. When I use 'linux updates' I guess it assumes a CD installation after it reads the updates disk. Even though the low memory warning did not appear this time, I've taken the liberty of switching to tty2 at the point where the warning used to appear (right after clicking 'next' on the autopartition review window) and mcopy-ing /tmp/anaconda.log to a floppy disk. The file is appended below. I hope this helps. Let me know the next step.
Created attachment 93472 [details] as requested, but a 'low memory' warning did not occur.
After complaining about formatting floppies I did a long exercise in just that, formatting them, and learned to use fdformat and mkfs.ext2 as an ordinary user. I feel more confident working with removable devices (something I don't often do.) Thanks, I'm learning some very basic things that I've needed to for a long time.
This is odd. So the 'low memory' error occurs reliably if you don't use the update floppy I made?
My impression is that the low memory warning occurs reliably if I install from an NFS image, but let me play with your updates disk and the other installation types this week and try to learn more. Bob Cochran
Very strange - looking forward to your findings...
Correct me if I'm wrong....but if I use your updates disk, I won't be able to install over NFS, right?
It will work fine - the update disk is just a disk of replacement Python sources that get copied to /tmp/updates. Alternatively you can put the contents of the updates disk in the directory i386/RHupdates on your NFS server and they will be used. Then you don't need to use an updates floppy, and you dont need to put 'updates' on the boot command line. You'll have to make the RHupdates directory by hand, it doesn't exist in the default tree.
Closing due to inactivity. Please reopen if you have any further information to add to this bug report