[fedora-arm] Re: Heads-up / for discussion: dnf not working with 1G of RAM or less

Hi,

On 8/23/22 02:44, Adam Williamson wrote:
> Hey folks! I apologize for the wide distribution, but this seemed like
> a bug it'd be appropriate to get a wide range of input on.
>
> There's a bug that was proposed as an F37 Beta blocker:
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1907030
>
> it's quite an old bug, but up until recently, the summary was
> apparently accurate - dnf would run out of memory with 512M of RAM, but
> was OK with 1G. However, as of quite recently, on F36 at least (not
> sure if anyone's explicitly tested F37), dnf operations are commonly
> failing on VMs/containers with 1G of RAM due to running out of RAM and
> getting OOM-killed.
>
> There's some discussion in the bug about what might be causing this and
> potential ways to resolve it, and please do dig into/contribute to that
> if you can, but the other question here I guess is: how much do we care
> about this? How bad is it that you can't reliably run dnf operations on
> top of a minimal Fedora environment with 1G of RAM?
>
> This obviously has some overlap with our stated hardware requirements,
> so here they are for the record:
>
> https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora/latest/release-notes/welcome/Hardware_Overview/
>
> that specifies 2GB as the minimum memory for "the default
> installation", by which I think it's referring to a default Workstation
> install, though this should be clarified. But then there's a "Low
> memory installations" boxout, which suggests that "users with less than
> 768MB of system memory may have better results performing a minimal
> install and adding to it afterward", which kinda is recommending that
> people do exactly the thing that doesn't work (do a minimal install
> then use dnf on it), and implying it'll work.
>
> After some consideration I don't think it makes sense to take this bug
> as an F37 blocker, since it already affects F36, and that's what I'll
> be suggesting at the next blocker review meeting. However, it does seem
> a perfect candidate for prioritized bug status, and I've nominated it
> for that.
>
> I guess if folks can chime in with thoughts here and/or in the bug
> report, maybe a consensus will emerge on just how big of an issue this
> is (and how likely it is to get fixed). There will presumably be a
> FESCo ticket related to prioritized bug status too.

I still have quite a few x86_64 tablets with only 1G RAM, so I personally
definitely care about this.

With that said I do regularly run dnf on them without issues,
although I think most of the 1G models I have are still at F35...

Still I wonder why this is an issue in some cases:

1. ZRAM helps a lot here, but I guess with containers when limiting them
to 1G you really only get 1G since ZRAM works on the system level not
the container level. In the VM case though ZRAM should help, is ZRAM
enabled ? ZRAM is enabled by default for Workstation installs, but
maybe not in other installs ?

2. Maybe there are some other processes also taking up more RAM
then expected causing extra memory pressure ?

Regards,

Hans
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