Bug 84402

Summary:	Bitbake excessive memory comsumption causes Linux to freeze/crash with machines with less than 512MB of RAM
Product:	Gentoo Linux	Reporter:	David Anes <danes>
Component:	New packages	Assignee:	Embedded Gentoo Team <embedded>
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED
Severity:	critical
Priority:	High
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	x86
OS:	Linux
URL:	http://www.oesf.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=10107&hl=bitbake
Whiteboard:
Package list:		Runtime testing required:	---

Description David Anes 2005-03-07 08:07:50 UTC

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/."

Comment 1 SpanKY gentoo-dev

2005-03-08 15:35:39 UTC

added patch to ebuild