Re: qemu needs > 2 GB of RAM to build?

[Martin Jansa <martin.jansa@gmail.com>]

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On Fri, Nov 18, 2011 at 12:24:25PM -0800, Scott Garman wrote:
> On 11/18/2011 11:59 AM, Joshua Lock wrote:
> >
> >
> > On 18/11/11 11:49, Khem Raj wrote:
> >> On Fri, Nov 18, 2011 at 11:39 AM, Scott Garman<scott.a.garman@intel.com>  wrote:
> >>> Hi all,
> >>>
> >>> I'm testing building core-image-minimal in a resource-constrained
> >>> environment (a VirtualBox VM with 2300 MB of RAM allocated to it). With
> >>> PARALLEL_MAKE set to -j4 (the VM does have two CPUs allocated), I'm finding
> >>> that the build of qemu-native fails because the OOM killer steps in and
> >>> kills gcc. This is happening during the linking phase of building qemu.
> >
> > What's BB_NUMBER_THREADS set to? I had to reduce to 1 to build
> > qemu-native on a laptop with 2GB RAM. iirc it had a habit of linking
> > something equally large such as eglibc, qt or the kernel at the same time.
> 
> I had it set to 2, but I'm able to reproduce the problem when rebuilding 
> *only* qemu-native.
> 
> >> what distro are you running on guest ? it could be something wrong
> >> with the distro gcc or system
> >
> > I've seen this on F14 (Gnome 2.x) and F15 (Gnome 3) with a laptop with
> > only 2GB RAM.
> 
> This is a Fedora 14 host running GNOME 2.x
> 
> > I think BB_NUMBER_THREADS is the key here. And whether you're running
> > much in the way of a desktop environment.
> 
> I would have thought PARALLEL_MAKE would have been more of the issue - I 
> think I saw two instances of ld running via top when the crash occurred.
> 
> In any case, the purpose behind this exercise for me is to test the 
> feasibility of using a VM environment for performing builds. The idea is 
> to get Windows users started with some tutorial screencasts they can 
> follow along with using the VM until they feel compelled enough to set 
> up a native Linux development system.
> 
> It sounds like a system requirement of using this VM will have to be 
> that the host system have 6 GB or more of RAM (since the VM guest won't 
> be able to use all of that - generally around 50-60%). This pretty much 
> rules out its use on all but the most recent laptops.

Why not enable more swap? It's slow but works for short peaks in mem
usage. I have to extend our swap from 2G to 4G on VM with 2G RAM for
some builds.. also needed during linking unstripped libs :/.

Regards, 

> 
> Scott
> 
> -- 
> Scott Garman
> Embedded Linux Engineer - Yocto Project
> Intel Open Source Technology Center
> 
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-- 
Martin 'JaMa' Jansa     jabber: Martin.Jansa@gmail.com

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