Re: how to deal with "virtual memory exhausted: Cannot allocate memory"?

[Jeffrey Walton <noloader@gmail.com>]

>> > "virtual memory exhausted: Cannot allocate memory"
>> >
>> > What would be your recommendation -- demand removing mips* from
>> > supported architectures or there is a chance... ? ;)
>>
>> The build log says
>>   make -j4
>>
>> This is due to the following in debian/rules:
>>   dh $@ --parallel --sourcedirectory=src
>>
>> Running 4 instances of the compiler in parallel can quadruple
>> the memory usage.
>
> That is true, however the amount of memory per 32-bit process is
> unchanged and still limited to 2GB, so I doubt it will make any
> change.

IoT gadgets and other resource constrained devices usually don't have
virtual memory. I frequently experience OOM kills when using make's
job option on dev boards, like ci20, beaglebone, cubietrucks, banana
pi's, raspberry pi's, etc.

We experienced so many OOM kills with our test script we had to stop
using make's job option on certain machines. The machines had less
than 1280 MB of memory or lacked a swap file. Cf.,
https://github.com/weidai11/cryptopp/blob/master/cryptest.sh#L893

Does anyone know what kind of board is being used? What are its cpu
and memory specs? Does /proc/meminfo report a swap file?

Jeff