bug#65412: Guix installer failed to install

bug#65412: Guix installer failed to install

[Bruno Haible]

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Hi,

My attempt to install Guix 1.4.0 in a VM failed, shortly after a message:

guix system: warning: at least 6,035.5 MB needed but only 1,079.3 MB available in /mnt

The steps that I did are below. Data was uploaded as
installer-dump-2cf3425e.

The problem is not so much that it failed, but that the warning
message does not sufficiently describe the cause:
  * I understand the figure of 6 GB: that's the expected size for
    a GUI environment with MATE.
  * But I don't understand the figure of 1 GB.
    - Is /mnt a RAM disk (the VM has 2 GB of RAM), or did the installer fail
      to mount /mnt?
    - Or is /mnt overloaded to the swap partition (which has 1 GB in my config)?
    - Or is /mnt the 10 GB partition of my disk, and the downloaded binaries
      already filled 9 GB of it?
If I knew this, I would know what to do to fix the problem: Add more RAM?
Partition differently? Use a larger main partition?

Best regards.

Bruno

========================= What I did =========================
Download: guix-system-install-1.4.0.x86_64-linux.iso

Disk size: 10 GB

Language: English.
Territory: United States.
Graphical install.
Timezone: Europe/Berlin
Keyboard: English (US)
Hostname: guix14
Root password: ********
Add user:
  User: bruno
  Full name: Bruno Haible
  Home directory: /home/bruno
  Password: ********
Desktop environment: MATE + ExWM
Enable OpenSSH daemon.
Partitioning: Guided. gpt. One partition.
  Delete partitions 2 and 3.
  Create new partitions:
    9.7 GB ext4 /
    1035 MB linux-swap

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bug#65412: Guix installer failed to install

[Josselin Poiret via Bug reports for GNU Guix]

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Hi Bruno,

Bruno Haible <bruno@clisp.org> writes:
>
> The problem is not so much that it failed, but that the warning
> message does not sufficiently describe the cause:
>   * I understand the figure of 6 GB: that's the expected size for
>     a GUI environment with MATE.
>   * But I don't understand the figure of 1 GB.
>     - Is /mnt a RAM disk (the VM has 2 GB of RAM), or did the installer fail
>       to mount /mnt?
>     - Or is /mnt overloaded to the swap partition (which has 1 GB in my config)?
>     - Or is /mnt the 10 GB partition of my disk, and the downloaded binaries
>       already filled 9 GB of it?
> If I knew this, I would know what to do to fix the problem: Add more RAM?
> Partition differently? Use a larger main partition?

My guess is that, because a Guix system init installs some stuff in
steps, one of these steps ended up requiring too much space, that would
be bullet point 3 above.  You can check that it's not 1 or 2 by, once
you reproduce this bug, going to tty3 (using ctrl+alt+f3), and typing
`lsblk` to check which partition is mounted where.  In the meantime, I
would probably recommend adding some space for /.

Best,
-- 
Josselin Poiret

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bug#65412: Guix installer failed to install

[Bruno Haible]

Hi Josselin,

Thanks for the answer.

> > The problem is not so much that it failed, but that the warning
> > message does not sufficiently describe the cause:
> >   * I understand the figure of 6 GB: that's the expected size for
> >     a GUI environment with MATE.
> >   * But I don't understand the figure of 1 GB.
> >     - Is /mnt a RAM disk (the VM has 2 GB of RAM), or did the installer fail
> >       to mount /mnt?
> >     - Or is /mnt overloaded to the swap partition (which has 1 GB in my config)?
> >     - Or is /mnt the 10 GB partition of my disk, and the downloaded binaries
> >       already filled 9 GB of it?
> > If I knew this, I would know what to do to fix the problem: Add more RAM?
> > Partition differently? Use a larger main partition?
> 
> My guess is that, because a Guix system init installs some stuff in
> steps, one of these steps ended up requiring too much space, that would
> be bullet point 3 above.

Yes, that was it. I did the same procedure again, this time with a disk
of size 20 GB instead of 10 GB. The installation succeeded, and after the
installation 6-7 GB of the disk were used. But the qcow2 disk image was
14 GB large, indicating that the maximum use of the disk had been 14 GB.
So, yes, there must have been ca. 7 GB of data that were temporarily used
and deleted near the end of the installation process.

Suggestion: Extend the message "... but only 1,079.3 MB available in /mnt"
- either to include details about /mnt:
  "... but only 1,079.3 MB available in /mnt, mount point for /dev/sda2
   (file system type: ext4)"
- or to include details about the usage of /mnt:
  "... but only 1,079.3 MB available in /mnt, a file system with 8,543 MB
   total size, of which 7,421 MB are already in use"

Bruno