memory requirements / low mem installs

[Steffen Grunewald]

On Thu, Aug 12, 2004 at 11:51:41AM +1000, Andrew Janke wrote:
> On Wed, 11 Aug 2004, Steffen Grunewald wrote:
> > > There's no indication for memory requirements in the Fai Guide (or I
> > > missed it again).
> Well from my own experience it would appear that 96MB doesn't seem to be enough.
> :(  I am paring down the DEFAULT install's packages to see if I can make it
> work....
> 
> I'm attempting an FAI install on a HP Vectra P166 96MB RAM, boot disk works
> great (via DHCP) install works great but it seems to randomly hang typically in
> the packages install section but sometimes it has made it all the way to
> DEFAULT/S01 at which stage it barfs.

Then you get a "VM: killing task" message, too.
I found a (simple) workaround (Thomas, this might be worth to go into
default FAI?):

I created a file hooks/mountdisks.DEFAULT:

#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/free
swapdev=`perl -ne 'print "$1\n" if /^(\/dev\/\S+)\s+none\s+swap/;' /tmp/fai/fstab | head -1`
swapon $swapdev
/usr/bin/free
exit 0

Fortunately, FAI is easily extendable :-)

I then found that I was using a "preserve" partition for swap and did
not "format" it... thus task_mountdisks didn't activate it... probably
that's your problem too?
Do you have a line "Enable swap device" after "Calling task_mountdisks"?


Cheers,
 Steffen
 
-- 
Steffen Grunewald * * * Merlin cluster admin (http://pandora.aei.mpg.de)
Albert-Einstein-Institut (MPI Gravitationsphysik, http://www.aei.mpg.de)
       Science Park Golm, Am Mühlenberg 1, 14476 Potsdam, Germany
e-mail: steffen.grunewald(*)aei.mpg.de * +49-331-567-{fon:7233,fax:7298}