yum and low memory kernel behaviour

[Gregory Woodbury]

On Sun, Oct 24, 2004 at 03:12:27AM -0400, seth vidal wrote:
> On Sun, 2004-10-24 at 02:39 -0400, Gregory Woodbury wrote:
> > I have a small memory notebook (old Dell Latitude) with only 64MB of
> > RAM.  It is running FC3t3+rawhide (2004-10-23) using XFCE.  I mostly use
> > it as an intelligent terminal to other machines across the LAN, however
> > I expect it to be able to do other things (very) slowly when I need it
> > to do so.  The system _should_ swap to disk when necessary, but recent
> > kernels have been more inclined to invoke the OOM killer and kill off
> > various services.
> > 
> > Yum 2.1.10-3 is very good at trigerring this problem.  Trying to create
> > the pickle for the development repository will consistently kill the
> > machine.
> 
> The pickle for the development repository would be about 200MB of memory
> to read then write out.
> 
> There's no way to do what you want to do in 64M of ram w/o swapping.
> 
> -sv

Of course it can't do it without swapping.
But it *should* swap and run slowly rather than kill off the machine
with the OOM_killer.
Whose problem is it?  The kernel for not managing swap right, or yum for
not allowing the use of swap space for making the pickle?

-- 
G.Wolfe Woodbury     `- -'
RHCT                   U
The Line Eater is a boojum!
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/attachments/20041024/253680f4/attachment.bin