Installer fails with "out of swap space" when installing ZFS-on-root with less then 4 GB mem (10.0-RC4)

[Teske, Devin]

On Jan 5, 2014, at 5:27 PM, Mark Martinec wrote:

> [snip]
> I understand that ZFS would be happier with more memory for heavy production
> use, and that a modern real iron has much more than 4 GB of memory, but
> virtualized guests are often dedicated to a single task and could do well
> with 'just' 2 GB of memory, even if using ZFS.
> 
> So my suggestion is twofold:
> 
> - let the installer mount the available swap partitions before jumping
>  into heavy installation work;
> 

That sounds reasonable enough.



> - avoid covering an underlying failure with a quickly-redrawn installer
>  menu; at least some delay after a failure but before erasing the screen
>  would be useful, avoiding the user to go to great lengths to be able to
>  capture the failure reason.
> 

While the error reporting could be improved in that area of bsdinstall that
you fingered, the perception that the errors are quickly being erased is
incorrect. What's actually going on is the errors are being shunted over to
vty1 (Alt+F2) as well as /tmp/bsdinstall_log

But granted... the error messages that are displayed on vty0 could certainly
be improved (which will take time).

Thank you very much for testing and feedback.
-- 
Cheers,
Devin

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