Bug#932149: Question about documented Buster ram requirement (#932149)
Dear Samuel Thibault,
I was about to prepare a patch to fix #932149 by removing what I understood
to be outdated information, but then realized you've actually made recent
changes to it and must thus ask for your knowledge. Details below.
Martin Samuelsson @ 2019-07-16 (Tuesday), 17:58 (+0200)
If increasing the memory allocation for the target machine from 512MB
to 1024MB the error goes away.
Summary of issue #932149: Debian installer fails with strange errors if
attempting to install on less than 550MB, yet the Installation guide states
256MB/512MB/170MB should be sufficient.
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.
The values seem to come from version 1.47 of lowmem from merely a few months
back. How are they obtained?
Since they are significantly lower than those of section 2.5, and impossible
to fit the initrd of buster's debian-installer, should they really be in the
Installation Guide at all? In case they truely belong there, how could
section 3.4 be improved to properly describe the requirements for such
installations?
Fair enough though, there is conflicting information in section 2.5,
Memory and Disk Space Requirements, where the figure is 550MB.
Would the correct fix be to rephrase the documentation so that it is clear
that 3.4 covers the requirement of an installed system, while the higher
basic requirements in 2.5 are needed for the actual installation?
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.
Above section only left for pointing out lowmem parameter changes nothing.
Due to Debian BTS harvested addresses being my primary spam source, I'm not
monitoring this address. Yet I follow the bug report and my contact info is
avaible at https://bugs.debian.org/199392#40 if needed.
--
/Martin
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