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

["Michael F. Lamb" <mike@orbital.rodeo>]

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Hi Guix maintainers!

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.

Apologies for lack of a patch; hopefully once I have some more experience with Guix I can help out more directly!

Cheers,
Mike

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