Arch Linux

grndrush

Member

From: Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

Registered: 2003-12-28

Posts: 136

Website

[Solved] Problem with 2008.03-0.3 ISO

I'm trying to keep this as concise as possible, but not sure what's relevant, and I've been up all night fighting this.

H/W is Athlon64 XP+ in an ASUS A8V-MX (Socket 939, K8M800/VT8251 N/S-bridge) mobo, 512MB RAM, old GF2 MX/400 AGP video card. Hardware is and has been stable. My disk setup is a single-partition LVM volume, including swap, and all JFS except for /boot (ext2, not LVM).

I D/L'ed the new ISO last night (i686, CORE), but can't complete an install.  I tried at least 5 or 6 times. I've installed Arch on this same platform (including disk layout) successfully well over a dozen times (minimum), albeit not always using JFS. I ended up reverting to the prior ISO (2007.08-2) and the exact same setup installed fine, so I do believe this is a legitimate problem.

The (varying) error messages I got indicate the install is running out of memory. I know the LVM install procedure by heart, but did end up referencing it to insure I hadn't missed anything; I saw nothing I'd overlooked.

I created and mounted all my partitions: root, /boot, /var, /home, and swap, then went into Arch Setup, selected all base packages, and attempted to install them. It died on me every time during the package install. I don't have any info from the 1st 2 (except from memory), as I assumed I'd screwed something up.

Note that the LVM install guide doesn't indicate whether or not you're supposed to do a 'swapon -a' after the 'mkswap' before entering /arch/setup (and I don't remember having done so before), so I ended up trying it both ways (the 2007.08-2 install went fine w/o this step).

My notes aren't the best (it was the middle of the night by then, and of course no way to save the output), further complicated by the fact the messages came from the install screen, F-12, and dmesg (and I have no way of determining the order). The detailed errors were different every single install, but here's what I have:

I allocate 1 GB to swap, but ALL the installs indicated zero swap - as though it never got turned on (whether or not I did a 'swapon -a' before entering setup - my swapon's didn't activate swap). I saw this in all three places; in one instance, dmesg reported 509MB actually in use, and 5MB free - that's all I have. A couple of times, I received an "bad fs type, bad superblock, or / problem" (not of these are verbatim, sorry) - which led me to believe it was my error - but I didn't get this every time. A couple of times I got a "device nodes don't exist: /dev/console, /dev/null, /dev/zero." What was fairly consistent, from F-12 and dmesg, was either pacman.static, or portmap, "Killed." "Active (action?) score of 441" from portmap once, and pacman.static died with "...score of 104 or a child" (one attempt), and "...score of 106" on another (no ref to a child). I also have a note from one attempt: "gen_init_cpio invoked oom_killer; gfp_mark=0x200d2, order=0, oomkilladj=0."

I presume "oom"="Out Of Memory".

Sorry my report isn't clearer - the first several attempts I assumed I was just having a bad night. But the 2007.08-2 ISO installed fine. I don't have that much invested in this install ATM - I'm willing to reinstall if would help chase this down. I don't even have X installed yet - this report is being sent from my ancient (K6/350) Win98 printer/scanner server. But at this point, I'm really exhausted - I'll watch this post for a bit, but then I'm likely to be sleeping for 12 hours.

Last edited by grndrush (2008-04-02 18:48:10)

tpowa

Developer

From: Lauingen , Germany

Registered: 2004-04-05

Posts: 2,322

Re: [Solved] Problem with 2008.03-0.3 ISO

ahhh, i know why it died, you didn't use setup to choose the mountpoints,
the install package path has changed from /mnt to /tmp/install
that's the reason why you run out of memory you install the packages to plain ram and not to disk

grndrush

Member

From: Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

Registered: 2003-12-28

Posts: 136

Website

Re: [Solved] Problem with 2008.03-0.3 ISO

Ah! Glad you were able to figure the problem out from my chicken-scratching, and thanks for the prompt reply - I lay down for a few minutes, planning to check back promptly, but sleep came instantly.

I guess there's no need to reinstall just to use the latest ISO, eh? I'm starting to install X now.

Glad the problem is the FM and NOT the ISO itself, LOL...thanks, tpowa.