Re: aptitude not working

[Richard Braun]

On Mon, Nov 07, 2016 at 05:34:23PM +0100, Riccardo Mottola wrote:
> do you mean what vm_page reports at the earliest stages of boot?
> It says 751M in pages, 733M free

Yes, but specifically :

vm_page: page table size: 786414 entries (43008k)
vm_page: DMA: pages: 4080 (15M), free: 0 (0M)
vm_page: DMA: min:500 low:600 high:1000
vm_page: DIRECTMAP: pages: 233472 (912M), free: 217899 (851M)
vm_page: DIRECTMAP: min:11673 low:14008 high:23347

the "high" threshold. If you add all the high thresholds together,
you'll know how much memory must be free before the pageout daemon
stops.

> After loading aptitude, it tells me there are 535M free.  Just before hang,
> I see 526M free and it remains there with "total progress" not even starting
> and nothing to do
> (since the system was freshly upgraded with apt-get, I just removed a
> package, thus there was nothing to download)
> 
> Should I check memory differently? at a glance, I don't think we are going
> out of mem here.

>From what you describe, it doesn't seem to be a hang caused by this.
With your amount of memory, you shouldn't even have a HIGHMEM segment,
which makes bugs even less likely. So I don't know what happened to
your system, or if you're doing something wrong or not. I've just
installed a Hurd system on a VM myself, and I had paging problems
when upgrading from the snapshot to unstable, but once I assigned 2g
of RAM, I could upgrade without too much trouble with aptitude. I
use it on all my machines, Linux and Hurd, and never have such issues.

-- 
Richard Braun