Bug#932149: Early segfault in steal-ctty on Xen DomU install
Control: retitle -1 Buster install requires more ram than documented
If increasing the memory allocation for the target machine from 512MB to
1024MB the error goes away.
This is unexpected since the section 3.4 of Buster's Installation Guide for
amd64 states that the requirement of an installed system is 256MB, and that
the actual installer should require only 170MB. Section 6.3.1.1 also states
"One of the first things debian-installer does, is to check available
memory."
Fair enough though, there is conflicting information in section 2.5, Memory
and Disk Space Requirements, where the figure is 550MB and no claim is made
there that d-i attempts to detect insufficient available memory.
Attempting to boot with kernel parameter lowmem set to 1 or 2 makes no
difference. Insufficient ram results in seg fault and errors about missing
console files regardless of lowmem's value.
Ideally this should be addressed both with updates to the documentation and
with error handling notifying the user that resource shortage is causing the
problems.
Maybe a pragmatic fix could be to check for available ram early and halt the
installation process with a clear message if needed?
--
/Martin
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