From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1755785Ab1KRUf5 (ORCPT ); Fri, 18 Nov 2011 15:35:57 -0500 Received: from mx1.redhat.com ([209.132.183.28]:45093 "EHLO mx1.redhat.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1753605Ab1KRUf4 (ORCPT ); Fri, 18 Nov 2011 15:35:56 -0500 Date: Fri, 18 Nov 2011 15:35:49 -0500 From: Dave Jones To: Linux Kernel Cc: rusty@rustcorp.com.au, jcm@jonmasters.org Subject: depmod memory usage. Message-ID: <20111118203548.GA17761@redhat.com> Mail-Followup-To: Dave Jones , Linux Kernel , rusty@rustcorp.com.au, jcm@jonmasters.org MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.21 (2010-09-15) Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org I pulled out an older laptop last night to test something, and built a kernel on it. When I did the make install part, the machine almost ground to a halt. It turned out that depmod used at peak 1.7GB of memory, (the laptop only had 1GB, so it was swapping to the point of locking up interactivity for minutes at a time). It took an hour to complete. The config file is pretty pathological (it's a distro build, so tons of modules -- http://codemonkey.org.uk/junk/fedora-config-x86-64) It's been a while since I built on a machine with this amount of memory, but it seems that depmod has taken a big step backwards as it used to cope with this just fine. This is with the m-i-t that shipped in Fedora 16 (3.16) Dave