Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 78811
up2date exits misteriosly when out of memory
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:48:47 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705) Description of problem: When running up2date -u glibc glibc-common glibc-devel on a freshly installed machine, if i have only 32 MB of ram, up2date will exist after some time in the "checking dependencies" phase, with a misterios message : Terminated Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): using up2date 2.8.39 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. install redhat on a machine with 32 MB of ram 2. run up2date -u glibc glibc-common glibc-devel (After registering with rhn of course) Actual Results: up2date exits with the message "terminated" during the depencency check Expected Results: up2date should display a clear message about not having enough memory to resolve the dependencies Additional info: I have discovered this while working with UML (user mode linux) - by default UML assigns only 32 MB of memory to each kernel instance. I have arrived to a conclusion that this is a low memory problem after i tried to run : up2date -ud glibc glibc-common glibc-devel and got a message "unable to allocate memory". adding additional 100MB swap solved the problem
Well, it sounds like the Out Of Memory killer killed the process off, implying that the system itself ran out of memory, and the kernel killed off up2date to free up memory. Since running under UML isnt really supported, (not to mention the hardware reqs for 7.3 gui is 64megs + big swap), I'm closing this as not a bug. I don't think it's really worth trying to have up2date attempt to outsmart the kernels vm to prevent this kind of OOM kill.