Anaconda memory requirements

[Jesse Keating]

On Aug 21, 2011, at 8:16 AM, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 20, 2011 at 16:02:08 -0600,
>  Pete Zaitcev <zaitcev at redhat.com> wrote:
>> On Sat, 20 Aug 2011 11:31:55 -0700
>> John Reiser <jreiser at bitwagon.com> wrote:
>> 
>>>> How much  memory will anaconda require to install Fedora 16?
>>> 
>>> Anaconda requires 768MB, and more (>=1GB) if there is no swap partition.
>> 
>> It is not just Anaconda. F15 GA kernel would not even uncompress
>> initramfs on anything below 1GB.
> 
> There must be some caveat to this, as I am running F15 on a machine with
> only 512 MB of memory. I had to install F14 and upgrade to F15 to get there,
> but once set up, things work fine.


In Fedora 15, all of the "stage2" content, that is anaconda and supporting libraries, were made part of the initrd.  This was a change from previous releases, where the initrd was just stage1, that was enough infrastructure to find and launch stage2.  Moving it into the initrd resolved a lot of outstanding issues with Anaconda, and removed a lot of duplicate code that was difficult to maintain.

There was a jump in memory requirements, as now all of that content was loaded into memory, and there are potential fixes being worked on.  However they were deemed too risky for Fedora 15 and thus did not make it.

This is why the install kernel requires significantly more ram than the kernel you'd use after you've done an install.

- jlk