If a guix operation fails due to running out of memory, it's reported to the user as an internal error, instructing them to report a bug to bug-guix. For example:
# guix pull Updating channel 'guix' from Git repository at 'https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/guix.git'... Building from this channel: guix https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/guix.git 46a64c7 substitute: updating substitutes from 'https://bordeaux.guix.gnu.org'... 100.0% substitute: updating substitutes from 'https://ci.guix.gnu.org'... 100.0% substitute: updating substitutes from 'https://bordeaux.guix.gnu.org'... 100.0% substitute: updating substitutes from 'https://ci.guix.gnu.org'... 100.0% substitute: updating substitutes from 'https://bordeaux.guix.gnu.org'... 100.0% substitute: updating substitutes from 'https://ci.guix.gnu.org'... 100.0% module-import 2KiB 56KiB/s 00:00 ▕██████████████████▏ 100.0% module-import-compiled 1.3MiB 2.4MiB/s 00:01 ▕██████████████████▏ 100.0% compute-guix-derivation 1KiB 877KiB/s 00:00 ▕██████████████████▏ 100.0% Computing Guix derivation for 'x86_64-linux'... \ GC Warning: Failed to expand heap by 8388608 bytes [previous line repeats 79 more times] GC Warning: Failed to expand heap by 69632 bytes GC Warning: Out of Memory! Heap size: 402 MiB. Returning NULL! Warning: Unwind-only out of memory exception; skipping pre-unwind handler. guix pull: error: You found a bug: the program '/gnu/store/6pckga173mjbpfz7a2bl93h4gimd8fp5-compute-guix-derivation' failed to compute the derivation for Guix (version: "46a64c7fdd057283063aae6df058579bb07c4b6a"; system: "x86_64-linux"; host version: "e4aabf42b33346849cb565199cfafc49d4f0aeff"; pull-version: 1). Please report the COMPLETE output above by email to <bug-guix@gnu.org>. The fact that it ran the computer out of RAM is *not* a bug per se -- perhaps we could talk about reducing "guix pull"'s memory requirements, but that's a big hairy design challenge probably. But that means there *is* a bug: the fatal exception handler should have a dedicated message for out-of-memory conditions, directing the user to add more swap or something, instead of reporting a bug. For reference, this is a server with this much RAM as of when I ran the above command: # free -h total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 969Mi 229Mi 557Mi 0B 319Mi 739Mi Swap: 613Mi 39Mi 574Mi Enabling zswap did not permit a successful "guix pull" but increasing the amount of available swap space to 2Gi did. (Memory overcommit is disabled. Peak memory usage, with the increased swap, was roughly 1.5Gi.) zw
