F17 anaconda 768MB limit

[kldixon]

Is there any hope that the 768MB memory constraint of anaconda be reduced for Fedora 17?
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showpost.php?p=1538908&postcount=6

[AdamW]

yes, it certainly will. we just need to get around to doing some testing to establish the new correct minimum. It'll be at most 512MB, hopefully less than that.

[Riky75]

Hello,

does anybody know whether it is possible already with the alpha release or not?

Thanks

Riky

[kldixon]

The last time I tried was Beta RC1 netinst and that was still 768MB

[nonamedotc]

It is 768MB minimum until beta RC3. May be it will be changed for beta release - I do not know ..

[AdamW]

still didn't get around to it. sigh. there is a parameter you can pass to disable the check now, though. remind me to bug wwoods to tell me what it is.

[Ssl]

Hi, here is workaround - edit your /usr/sbin/anaconda, set needed_ram = 0 and start installation. Works for me on old notebook w/512 MB of RAM

[nonamedotc]

Hi, here is workaround - edit your /usr/sbin/anaconda, set needed_ram = 0 and start installation. Works for me on old notebook w/512 MB of RAM

Let me see if I understand this right - This would work in a Live CD, yes. But what about a Full DVD installation? I am not sure if this is still possible.

[Ssl]

I would rather wait for a command line param from Adam - for all install media. Haven't tried dvd install media for years, perhaps you could kill anaconda process from vt, edit mentioned file and start it again ?

[Robby]

More than a month has gone by now, any more concrete news on this?
What is the command line parameter, if any? And does it work on all installation media?
Has anyone tested the absolute lowest amount of RAM required? For example, with Fedora 10 384MB of RAM was enough, are we finally back to this level again or is more RAM still required?

[nonamedotc]

Well, I have used 500 MB 512MB RAM on Virtualbox and was able to install it. That's the lowest I have checked...

[AdamW]

The final release has the limit at 512MB, and there's a parameter you can pass to disable the check, I think 'nomemcheck' or 'inst.nomemcheck'.

[Robby]

I have just done a fairly default test installation of Fedora 17.RC4 using DVD media on a physical machine with only 256MB of RAM using 'nomemcheck' and that worked!

I'm happy, because this means I can for sure install it on a 384MB machine that is currently running Fedora 10. Awesome! :)

[RupertPupkin]

I have just done a fairly default test installation of Fedora 17.RC4 using DVD media on a physical machine with only 256MB of RAM using 'nomemcheck' and that worked!
Awesome! I hope this info goes in the Fedora Project wiki. More people need to know about this! I always thought that such a high memory requirement went against the idea of using Linux to make old machines useful. Now we won't have to worry about that. :dance:

[AdamW]

Success with 256MB is by no means assured; it does depend to an extent on the package set you install and also on how much swap space anaconda can take advantage of. I believe anaconda will use any swap space it finds on a target drive, but I'm not totally sure of the details.

[Robby]

Well, for this test setup I chose "Software Development" and didn't change any of the packages, and let anaconda decide on the swap space to use. It created a swap partition of 512MB which seems enough for this to work. I wouldn't even choose a smaller size with this low amount of RAM because that would indeed be asking for trouble. For me it was more important to see how much RAM was actually needed, swap space I got plenty if needed, the hard drive is large enough. But I'm not sure if anaconda did infact use the swap space during the installation, I didn't switch to a console to check it as I didn't want to "disturb" it during the installation. I can always do a reinstall and check that it does (or does not).

Edit: I'll do a reinstall and check if anaconda uses it or not and report back here.

[Robby]

It does indeed make use of the available swap space, nice feature.

I went a little crazy and did an install of ALL packages, good for a total of 2761 packages. This unfortunately failed at the very end of the installation and displayed an unhandled exception dialog when attempting to run grub2-install, and when I switched to a console I also saw some errors when it attempted to run lokkit but that wasn't displayed in the unhandled exception dialog. The error in both cases was of course 'Cannot allocate memory'.

I then went on to reinstall the system yet again (again with all packages selected), this time instead of the default 512MB swap space anaconda created I made it 1024MB and that worked.
So, 256MB of RAM + 1024MB swap space is enough to have a successful installation and a bootable system afterwards.

[AdamW]

that's a good result, glad it worked out for you!