bug#57474: compute-guix-derivation fails due to insufficient memory

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

"Michael F. Lamb" <mike@orbital.rodeo> skribis:

> I was following the instructions in the Guix Reference Manual for running 
> Guix in a VM using the pre-built qcow2 VM image:
>
> https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/guix.html#Running-Guix-in-a-VM
>
> The documentation instructs me to create a qemu VM with the option '-m 1024' 
> which provides it 1GB of RAM.
>
> After doing so, each time I attempted to run 'guix pull', I received the 
> error message:
>
>> You found a bug: the program '/gnu/store/...-compute-guix-derivation' failed 
>> to compute the derivation for Guix (version: "..."; system: "x86_64-linux"; 
>> host version: "..."; pull-version: 1).
>
> Searching for this error message led me to many reports where "just run 'guix 
> pull' again" eventually worked for the reporter but such was not the case for 
> me.
>
> Watching "top" while running "guix pull" showed the memory usage increasing 
> to 100% whereupon "guix pull" fails. I set the -m option to '4096' and 
> thereafter 'guix pull' worked for me.
>
> A few approaches you might take:
>
> 1. Make 'compute-guix-derivation' or the process that executes it better at 
> reporting what variety of failure has occurred.
> 2. Change the docs to increase the default amount of memory granted to the 
> VM. (But this might not be helpful for users with older machines and limited 
> available memory.)
> 3. Change the docs to provide the VM with swap space.
> 4. Attempt to reduce the amount of memory compute-guix-derivation requires to 
> complete.

It looks like the memory requirements to build the latest revisions of
Guix have increased (and this is a bit ridiculous).

I checked with
<https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/guix/guix-system-vm-image-1.3.0.x86_64-linux.qcow2>
and ‘-m 2048’ gives us enough headroom, so I modified the manual
accordingly in commit 98a8b48a69b8208475c9a1e40d09517f8643b8cb.

Thanks for your report!

Ludo’.