Bug#726009: Insufficient RAM on build-machines (was Bug#726009: yade: FTBFS on i386 (and others))

[Kurt Roeckx]

On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 12:32:27PM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote:
> severity 726009 serious
> thanks
> 
> This remains a serious bug.  Your package, which previously built on
> multiple architectures, is now failing to build due to memory exhaustion. 
> While in some circumstances it is permissible to remove the old binaries and
> drop support for an architecture, this remains a serious bug until this has
> been done.  (And anyway, your package won't reach testing in the current
> state, so is de facto unreleasable.)
> 
> On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 09:00:36PM +0200, Anton Gladky wrote:
> > severity 726009 wishlist
> > retitle 726009 Yade requires too much RAM for building
> > thanks
> 
> > thanks for bug-report. The problem is, that all build-failures are due
> > to insufficient RAM on build-machines [1]. I do not really know how to
> > "fix" that except of backlisting of some machines, as was suggested by
> > Julien [2]. The same package builds fine on Launchpad's PPA. It seems,
> > the package builds only on machines, where >4Gb RAM is available.
> 
> This diagnosis is incorrect.  The error you are hitting here is not that you
> are exhausting the available memory on the machine, it's that you're
> exhausting the *address space* on the machine.  Adding more memory to the
> buildd would have zero effect, because you're on a 32-bit system which has a
> limit of 4GB of address space anyway.  (In practice, I believe this is 3GB
> for userspace and 1GB for kernel on i386.)

I've explained this same thing to people before.  All i386 buildds
are now actually running on an amd64 hosts with an amd64 kernel.
All of them have more than 4 GB available except from brahms which
only as 2 GB + 512 MB of swap.

The buildds it failed on (babin, biber) each have 8 GB of RAM
available.

With an amd64 kernel, i386 userspace can actually use 4 GB, which
is more than it can on a real i386 host.

If you fix it on the other buildds and it still fails on brahms I
can either ask DSA to give more RAM to it or I can exclude the
package there.


Kurt