bug#48963: "guix build guix" halts after exhausting memory

[Julien Lepiller <julien@lepiller.eu>]

Le Sat, 12 Jun 2021 00:23:30 +0200,
Julien Lepiller <julien@lepiller.eu> a écrit :

> Hi Guix!
> 
> I tried updating my system on my armhf board (2GB of RAM), but during
> "guix system reconfigure", guix tries to build itself (the guix
> package from (gnu packages package-management)). This package uses
> too much memory to build, and I start getting GC warnings like so:
> 
> GC Warning: Out of memory - trying to allocate requested amount (552
> bytes)...
> GC Warning: Header allocation failed: dropping block
> GC Warning: Out of Memory! Heap size: 2571 MiB. Returning NULL!
> Warning: Unwind-only out of memory exception; skipping pre-unwind
> handler.
> 
> after some more progress and a lot more warnings, the build stops (CPU
> is at 2%), but the memory is not freed. The build stayed stuck for a
> long time until I decided to cancel it.
> 
> As a work-around, I tried using the guix-daemon package instead (by
> changing the guix field in guix-configuration), but "guix system"
> still wants to build the guix package anyway. I tried finding usages
> of the guix package (grepping for "package-management" yields a
> relatively short list of files, and none of them seems to be used by
> my config, except (gnu services base) which always uses the guix from
> the configuration). Why?
> 
> Can we instead break the build (at the Makefile level) into multiple
> smaller chunks, that require less memory, in the same way (guix self)
> works?
> 
> 
> 

also note it's not an OOM issue at the system level, because guile
doesn't seem to care I have 8GB of free swap it could use. Top reports
1.8GB of resident memory being used by the process. I tried to stop all
services at the time in the hope it would save some memory and help,
but guile just kept swallowing all that free memory I gave it.