On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 2:52 PM, Jorge Almeida <[email protected]> wrote:
> # tar -xJvf /usr/portage/distfiles/m4-1.4.16.tar.xz
> xz: (stdin): Cannot allocate memory
> tar: Child returned status 1
> tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
>
> The box has 2G ram + 1G swap. I'm installing Gentoo from an existing distro.
> Emerging fails on m4. tar xJvf fails both from within the chroot and from the
> host system. top shows that nothing is using any amount of memory worth
> mentioning. Extracting libtool-2.4.tar.xz works. I can extract
> m4-1.4.16.tar.xz in a computer with 4G ram. This is ridiculous. Not gentoo
> related, except that I have no choice, as m4 is pulled by other packages.
> What to do?
>
> app-arch/xz-utils-5.0.3 in chroot
> xz 5.0.4 in host system (Archlinux)
How much do you have free? From xz's manpage:
Memory usage
The memory usage of xz varies from a few hundred kilobytes
to several gigabytes
depending on the compression settings. The settings used
when compressing a file
determine the memory requirements of the decompressor.
Typically the decompressor
needs 5 % to 20 % of the amount of memory that the
compressor needed when creating
the file. For example, decompressing a file created with xz
-9 currently requires
65 MiB of memory. Still, it is possible to have .xz files that
require several giga‐
bytes of memory to decompress.
Three things come to mind:
1) You may not have enough memory free
2) There may be a bug (either compile/link-induced or code-induced) in
the copy of xz you're using
3) Upstream used some insane settings, causing a massive increase in
the amount of RAM required to decompress that stream.
You could download the .tar.xz file, decompress it on a different box,
and then recompress it with lighter settings.
unxz filename.tar.xz
xz -1 filename.tar
--
:wq
