With a previous OOM bug, using text mode (e.g. by putting 'text' on the boot commandline) would allow the upgrade to complete successfully. Might be a usable workaround here - I'll test it and see.

See also bug #480826 and bug #474116

Note that I'm performing a preupgrade, which causes anaconda to keep install.img in memory. But it's also using tmpfs for /tmp (rather than ramfs), which should allow at least *some* of it to be swapped out. I'll attempt an upgrade using media later to see if that helps anything.

Using 'text' allows the (pre)upgrade to (eventually) complete. Otherwise I see OOM kills happening in syslog and the installation either hangs or crashes (depending on what gets OOM killed). 

Leading up to that point, I note that anaconda's heap (in /proc/$pid/maps) is somewhere between 150-200MB. That seems like a lot, but I guess x86_64 python is notorious for abusing the heap.

The bugs in comment #2 both concern *installations* rather than upgrades. I believe the memory requirements for fresh installs to be somewhat lower than upgrades, so it's possible that the change to tmpfs for /tmp might fix those.

Confirmed that the problem isn't preupgrade-specific: upgrading using a DVD also runs out of memory and dies when the kernel starts killing things.

Is the swap partition even getting used?  I don't see how there's really much we can do except raise the memory requirements and no one likes that.

It's active and there are definitely some things swapped out - but python's heap (which is maybe unswappable?) is around 200MB as the failure approaches.

I don't really have any good suggestions here other than to bump the amount of memory you're providing to the VM.  It's well known that upgrades are especially hard on memory requirements, as is x86_64.  And yes you're right, running with the graphical environment means you've got all that stuff sitting in memory consuming space too.

It's probably worth retesting this at some point, though if you're still seeing it I don't know that we can do anything more besides put this into WONTFIX.  We're definitely not going to get around to a serious memory usage audit with anaconda any time soon.

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