When using bitbake, the memory comsumption fullfills the main memory (512MB RAM) and half th swap (512MB on HD). Linux starts doing hyperpagging on the swap partition and Bitbake builds take forever. Openembedded guys recommend at least 512MB of RAM, but this is not always true. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install bitbake 2. Set bitbake environment 3. # bitbake gcc-cross (for example) Actual Results: Excessive memory comsumption causes Linux to do hyperpagging on the swap. Expected Results: Get the bitbake package compiled There is a patch on http://www.frankengul.org/~seb/cowbb/ to solve the problem, so the ebuild of bitbake could apply it before compiling bitbake. The patch reduces drastically the memory consumption of bitbake. Here is the IBot response on the #oe irc channel for the patch: "[bbcow] a couple patches for bitbake and openembedded to use copy-on-write for the metadata handling. It greatly reduces memory consumption. Get them at http://www.frankengul.org/~seb/cowbb/."
added patch to ebuild
