memory requirements

[sascha arthur]

Hello,

Was running now multiple times into the issue that the minimum memory requirements for the installer was not met. Processes got random killed by kernel with OOM, leading to a very weird behavior of the installer.

My experience says that (in case of loading the installer iso into the memory for example by using ipxe) the minimal requirements is about 3 GB of RAM.

Can anybody confirm this? Maybe could the installer also check this and denie/warn about the installation instead of dieing randomly?

[Michael Hudson-Doyle (mwhudson)]

You can netboot in less than that, about 1.5 GB, but you need to tiptoe around https://bugs.launchpad.net/cloud-init/+bug/1937319 by adding cloud-config-url=/dev/null to the kernel command line.

[sascha arthur (sarthur)]

Thanks for this hint.

But im already using this Parameter in combination with ipxe.

Lowering to less then 3 GB brings it sometimes to fail. Doing about 50-100 installs per week.

[Michael Hudson-Doyle (mwhudson)]

Hmm OK, I admit I haven't pushed the limit recently. Which release are you installing?

[sascha arthur (sarthur)]

latest impish stable

[Michael Hudson-Doyle (mwhudson)]

I tried with 2 GiB and hit a failure in update-initramfs which is perhaps not super surprising as we switched initramfs compression this cycle. Maybe we need to tweak the settings there to be more memory friendly.

[ov2k (ov2k)]

Is it at all awkward that the installer requires more RAM than the recommended system requirements?

https://ubuntu.com/server/docs/installation

[Michael Hudson-Doyle (mwhudson)]

We fixed the initramfs compression settings to be more RAM friendly before release but I personally didn't verify that it still worked in 1GiB... I guess we should make the docs more accurate if needed.