Dear Maintainer, Background and why : I recently tried the latest beta 1 installer of wheezy on my HP laptop. I use the same procedure on all laptops and servers. My preference is the Debian net installer and only install the minimal number of packages, i.e. for a server, no tasks at all are selected after the basic installation.
For desktops I prefer the light-weight/LXDE desktop and only select the
'Debian desktop' in the tasksel for additional packages. No laptop or no
additional utilities.
I have described the problem in an installation report [1], on a system
with 256MB, which brings the machine to it's knees.
But this will also be general problem for the wheezy release because it
will freeze the 256 MB computer in the aix post-install [1].
However the general issue, is that "apt-xapian-index (aix) is not aware
of available resources on the running host and aix does not adapt to it,
to be called and background process" [2,3,4].
Breaking the problem into two parts may help.
(A) release of wheezy installer with aix
(B) general use of aix on installed basis
Related to 'A' (see attachment for scripts). Obviously the installer
cries out for a test of installed memory with a line like:
/bin/cat /proc/meminfo | /usr/bin/awk '/^MemTotal/{ print $2 }'
Here are some proposals:
(i) aix installer decides to skip/proceed with install if total
memory <= 256 MB based on the information in /proc/meminfo.
(ii) never run the post-install to update the index on 256 MB [1] host
(iii) patch aix source with a few lines of python code to check installed
memory, and abort index run if installed memory <= 256 MB.
(iii) is required if in (i), it is decided to install aix on a <= 256 MB host.
That would address the use case when additional RAM is added. This addition
would require an additional aix package dependency on package python-statgrab.
(B) is more complex since it does require that aix address the root cause,
i.e. "apt-xapian-index (aix) is not aware of available resources on the
running host and aix does not adapt to it, to be called and background
process". This have been discussed in length [3,4].
Albeit my proposals does not address all issues, lets chew them in small
pieces. For the wheezy release I think it should be addressed quickly.
Please let me know if I can help (but I'm not a python programmer).
Regards
Bertil
Attachment:
As a first step, shell and python code snippets for memory detection.
References:
[1] Debian #685756: apt-xapian-index makes 256 MB RAM laptop very unresponsive
[2] Debian #516720: Implement a --stop option to stop a running indexer
[3] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/apt-xapian-index/+bug/363695
[4] Duplicate of [3] bugs at launchpad:
Bug #309879
Bug #370739
Bug #761304
Bug #769215
Bug #787536
Bug #801007
Bug #901636
sample-aix-py-and-sh-memory-scripts.tar.gz
Description: GNU Zip compressed data
