Steve Langasek wrote:
On Fri, Feb 16, 2007 at 04:51:55PM +0100, Pablo Ripolles wrote:
recently i've submitted an installation-report associated to a failed
etch installation (CD netinst method) on an AlphaStation 500/266. this
post is mainly because i suspect that it might be an alpha related bug
and because it was my first time reporting such problem. now, has
anyone in the alpha port community recently tried to install etch?
perhaps with a similar system as mine? i've no idea why this happened
and i'd like to be able to install etch in its final version. i'm
afraid that this bug report passes unnoticed, should i report it
otherwise? here is a link of the archived report:
I've certainly tested installing etch on alpha recently, but not on a
machine requiring low memory mode. I have no idea what the minimum memory
requirements for the installer might be on alpha.
well, it seems that "in theory" the minimum memory requirements are 64MB
(http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/manual/en.alpha/ch03s04.html). obviously
once installed, it might be striped down to an even lower requirement.
as you can see my alpha system has got these 64MB.
no big problem so far, however when i push it through "Detect network
hardware",
the logging console (Alt-F4) shows the kernel killing several processes
associated
with the message "Out of Memory"
Yes, that pretty much says it all.
yes, i guess...
I haven't looked at the low-memory mode menu in quite some time. Do you
have the option at this point to mount swap space? That's the only way
you're going to get enough virtual memory to be able to continue the install
of etch;
when i boot using the option "priority=low" i have access to a reduced
menu. to have access to the augmented menu where the disk options are,
i need to execute first "Detect and mount CD-ROM" and second "Load
installer components from CD". in the former entry i have the option to
exclude a number of unnecessary modules from being loaded which i do.
in these new menu is where the entries referring to "Detect disks" and
then "Partition disks" are. well, at this point, any thing i do, any
entry i execute (obviously including the disks related) fails, it just
doesn't fit in memory! therefore i cannot even mount swap space, i
cannot install etch in any way! or which are my left options?
there's certainly no way that the installer's memory requirements
on alpha are going to be lowered for etch.
i see it this way. it's true that 64MB of memory is nowadays very
little. i understand that every new version has got higher requirements
than previous ones (3.1 worked great!) . but:
-given the fact that it's said that 64MB is enough, then it should be
enough.
-given the fact that alpha is an almost extinguished architecture and
that it is (quite!) difficult to get working memory upgrades for those
machines, then the lower the memory requirements the better. i could
agree with your statement for the i386 architecture...
-given the fact that the warning of the "low memory mode" advices the
administrator to allocate swap space as soon as possible, then doing it
so at the very first opportunity should be possible.
well, anyway thanks for your answer... but what can i do? don't you
think it could be optimized at least to be able to mount swap space?
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