freebsd stable - Jan 2014 - Installer fails with "out of swap space" when installing ZFS-on-root with less then 4 GB mem (10.0-RC4)

I was playing with bhyve on 10.0-RC4, trying to install another 10.0-RC4 
into
a 16 GB ZFS volume using the network installation DVD. Mostly kept 
defaults,
except that I chose a ZFS-on-root installation. The amd64 host was given 
1 GB
of RAM on the first attempt, but failed. It fails on 2 GB RAM too, but 
succeeds
when given 4 GB of RAM.

It's a bit tricky to capture the failure reason, because the 
installation script
covers the underlying failure and just reports by the end of the 
'Archive Extraction'
phase:

   An installation step has been aborted.
   Would you like to restart the installation or exit the installer?

Nevertheless, capturing the output using a null modem on a bhyve's 
serial console
(/dev/nmdm) the failure reason is revealed:

Jan  5 03:20:10  kernel: pid 1496 (distextract), uid 0, was killed: out 
of swap space
Jan  5 03:20:10  kernel: pid 621 (devd), uid 0, was killed: out of swap 
space
Jan  5 03:20:10  kernel: pid 1176 (dhclient), uid 65, was killed: out of 
swap space
Jan  5 03:20:10  dhclient[1123]: connection closed
Jan  5 03:20:10  dhclient[1123]: exiting.
[1;24r[m[?7h[?1h=[?1h=[H[J FreeBSD Installer

So it seems that the gpt partitioning does succeed in creating the 
necessary
partitions including the swap space, but that swap space is not mounted
when the OS installation begins.

I'm sure that some percentage of virtual memory could easily be swapped 
out
with not much ill-effect on further decompressing and unpacking of files
and other installation steps. Seems unreasonable that 2 MB of memory is
insufficient for a plain OS installation on ZFS.

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;

- 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.

Mark

> I was playing with bhyve on 10.0-RC4, trying to install another 
> 10.0-RC4 into
> a 16 GB ZFS volume using the network installation DVD. Mostly kept 
> defaults,
> except that I chose a ZFS-on-root installation.
> The amd64 host was given 1 GB of RAM on the first attempt
typo:  s/host/guest/

The guest was given 1, 2 or 4 GB of mem.
The host had plenty of RAM.

   Mark

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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On Sun, Jan 5, 2014 at 5:27 PM, Mark Martinec
<Mark.Martinec+freebsd at ijs.si>wrote:
> I was playing with bhyve on 10.0-RC4, trying to install another 10.0-RC4
> into
> a 16 GB ZFS volume using the network installation DVD. Mostly kept
> defaults,
> except that I chose a ZFS-on-root installation. The amd64 host was given 1
> GB
> of RAM on the first attempt, but failed. It fails on 2 GB RAM too, but
> succeeds
> when given 4 GB of RAM.
>

How far did you get with this?  If you use BHyve to boot FreeBSD,
the loader which is used is in /usr/src/sys/boot/userboot , and
this loader does not support a complete ZFS-only install.
I recently tried to do this, and the install worked (with 4G of RAM),
but when I tried to reboot the BHyve VM, the VM did not boot.

If you look at: https://admbugs.freebsd.org/show_bug.cgi?id=428#c7

you will see I had to use a variation of these steps:
https://wiki.freebsd.org/RootOnZFS/UFSBoot

where the /boot directory which contained the kernel and loader was on a
UFS partition,
but everything else was on ZFS.  That's the only way I could get the BHyve
VM to boot, with userboot.

--
Craig