Re: [arch-general] virtual memory exhausted

On Fri, Jul 29, 2011 at 10:21 PM, Jan Steffens wrote:

On Fri, Jul 29, 2011 at 1:28 PM, Jorge Almeida wrote:

...

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...

Add a few gigabytes of swap, if you can. If that doesn't work, try running x86_64, if you don't.

I already found a solution. The problem is that the limits are too restrictive. There's probably a reason to have those values as default, but then nobody seems to understand this stuff that much, judging by Google... The solution is to issue, as root ulimit -u unlimited lfs ulimit -v unlimited lfs and then do the compiling as user lfs. By the way: this syntax (with the user as argument) seems to be completely undocumented! How hard could it be to add a few characters to the bash man page? (And finding that ulimit is a bash build-in is another matter, I don't remember how I found it.) I still don't know how to change the default... Cheers JA