I'm not sure this is an Arch issue, but I can't figure out what else can be. I'm trying to compile non-Arch stuff in an arch host. I tried Binutils (of LFS) and Buildroot (of uclibc). Both failed with the "virtual memory exhausted: Cannot allocate memory" error. The computer is a one-user workstation, which wasn't doing anything else worth mentioning... I tried both as root and as common user, same problem... # pacman -Q gcc gcc 4.6.1-2 # cat /proc/meminfo MemTotal: 2056484 kB MemFree: 1356260 kB Buffers: 74324 kB Cached: 551824 kB SwapCached: 0 kB Active: 148888 kB Inactive: 506268 kB Active(anon): 10624 kB Inactive(anon): 5716 kB Active(file): 138264 kB Inactive(file): 500552 kB Unevictable: 0 kB Mlocked: 0 kB HighTotal: 1178888 kB HighFree: 593112 kB LowTotal: 877596 kB LowFree: 763148 kB SwapTotal: 996024 kB SwapFree: 996024 kBDirty: 84 kB Writeback: 0 kB AnonPages: 10592 kB Mapped: 5868 kB Shmem: 5748 kB Slab: 31360 kB SReclaimable: 25156 kB SUnreclaim: 6204 kB KernelStack: 1112 kB PageTables: 1476 kB NFS_Unstable: 0 kB Bounce: 0 kB WritebackTmp: 0 kB CommitLimit: 2024264 kB Committed_AS: 61648 kB VmallocTotal: 122880 kB VmallocUsed: 14672 kB VmallocChunk: 80164 kB HardwareCorrupted: 0 kB AnonHugePages: 0 kB HugePages_Total: 0 HugePages_Free: 0 HugePages_Rsvd: 0 HugePages_Surp: 0 Hugepagesize: 4096 kB DirectMap4k: 20472 kB DirectMap4M: 888832 kB # ulimit -a core file size (blocks, -c) 0 data seg size (kbytes, -d) 58593 scheduling priority (-e) 0 file size (blocks, -f) unlimited pending signals (-i) 16046 max locked memory (kbytes, -l) 64 max memory size (kbytes, -m) unlimited open files (-n) 1024 pipe size (512 bytes, -p) 8 POSIX message queues (bytes, -q) 819200 real-time priority (-r) 0 stack size (kbytes, -s) 58593 cpu time (seconds, -t) unlimited max user processes (-u) 16046 virtual memory (kbytes, -v) 58593 file locks (-x) unlimited Maybe there is some arch-specific configuring to do? I have no idea whether these limit parameters require tweaking... TIA Jorge Almeida