While installing Gentoo from LiveCD, following instructions, kernel reported "Out-of-memory" and killed processes spawned as part of emerge system. The system in question has 64M of memory. For any system with this much memory or less, installation is effectively prevented. I have previous experience with Debian, so knew about the swapon command and was able to install quite happily after activating my swap space. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Get a system with 64M RAM or less 2. Insert LiveCD and boot 3. Try to install Gentoo following Handbook instructions Actual Results: Kernel reported Out-Of-Memory, and killed running parts of emerge system. Needless to say, emerge system didn't work. Expected Results: Er, i guess there's not much else the software could have done. Asking you to fit emerge system into 64M of memory or less is daft given the easy way. I'll re-iterate: the swapon command could be mentioned in the handbook. I think the sensible place to put it would be right after the drive partitioning, and therfore just after the swap partition has been created, and well before emerge system is run. This solution should have no ill effect for users with plenty memory. If you want you could even specify this option for low memory systems only.
I read: """ *** Activating the Swap Partition mkswap is the command that is used to initialize swap partitions: Code Listing 13: Creating a Swap signature # mkswap /dev/hda2 To activate the swap partition, use swapon: Code Listing 14: Activating the swap partition # swapon /dev/hda2 Create and activate the swap now. """ I've grepped the sources to see if all architectures had this and they do: """ hb-install-alpha-disk.xml:To activate the swap partition, use <c>swapon</c>: hb-install-alpha-disk.xml:# <i>swapon /dev/sda1</i> hb-install-amd64-disk.xml:To activate the swap partition, use <c>swapon</c>: hb-install-amd64-disk.xml:# <i>swapon /dev/hda2</i> hb-install-hppa-disk.xml:To activate the swap partition, use <c>swapon</c>: hb-install-hppa-disk.xml:# <i>swapon /dev/sda3</i> hb-install-mips-disk.xml:To activate the swap partition, use <c>swapon</c>: hb-install-mips-disk.xml:# <i>swapon /dev/sda2</i> hb-install-ppc64-disk.xml:To activate the swap partition, use <c>swapon</c>: hb-install-ppc64-disk.xml:# <i>swapon /dev/sda3</i> hb-install-ppc-disk.xml:To activate the swap partition, use <c>swapon</c>: hb-install-ppc-disk.xml:# <i>swapon /dev/hda3</i> hb-install-sparc-disk.xml:To activate the swap partition, use <c>swapon</c>: hb-install-sparc-disk.xml:# <i>swapon /dev/sda2</i> hb-install-x86-disk.xml:To activate the swap partition, use <c>swapon</c>: hb-install-x86-disk.xml:# <i>swapon /dev/hda2</i> """ Perhaps you just read over it?
