I have a fresh installation of Rocky9 and want to download some packages from EPEL, so I’ve done these operations to set up the repository, but it is still unusable as outputs shows:
dnf config-manager --set-enabled crb
dnf install epel-release
dnf clean all
so we can see all the repositories that you have enabled? I also use EPEL on Rocky 9 and it’s not a problem for me either. So there’s something weird on your machine I think.
solution:
Apparently, the problem was the amount of server RAM, i had 0.5 GB ram in total so added 2 GB swap file, and now it’s working with no problem.
grumbling:
Which is interesting how much ram one single repository might need!
Also it doesn’t make sense that this process was killed after the RAM consumption exceeded 80%. which left 20 percent unused
Hmm yeah, minimum requirements are actually 2GB ram, so you were way way down there. You can get away with 1GB if you remove all the ssd* packages. 512MB is not enough for Rocky to run.
The issue is not going to be EPEL specifically, but rather just adding one more repository at that stage was enough to push you OOM, think of it as the straw that broke the camel’s back.
512M is not enough to run EL9 in, you really need more. DO should not be selling EL9 instances with only 512M, that is madness.
Interestingly, we’ve had complaints from folks who want to use our AWS AMIs, e.g., with 512MB of RAM. We (the Cloud SIG) have specifically chosen to not enable these instance types because you need to take special care in order to use them (namely: ensuring SWAP is available, which is a bit of an antipattern in the cloud).
We try to aim for ‘least astonishment’ and, to me, that means users who wish to use these instance types with RL9 will have to clone the AMI and make it available on those instance types. Better (IMO) than vague failures like the above!
With any hope, dnf5 in EL10 will bring back a smaller memory foot print, but I’m not holding my breath for 512MB boots. As a data point, though, I can boot debian on as little as 256MB
Because those specs can be overkill in a minumal setup. The amount of memory needed for an install can easily be more than is needed to run the thing; e.g. I build with 3073Mb of RAM but then drop to 512M once the build is complete. A test machine running postfix and apache doesn’t need much memory!
# free -h
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 460Mi 96Mi 155Mi 3.0Mi 228Mi 364Mi
Swap: 0B 0B 0B
# dnf makecache
Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 9 - x86_64 101 kB/s | 29 kB 00:00
Rocky Linux 9 - BaseOS 17 kB/s | 4.1 kB 00:00
Rocky Linux 9 - AppStream 9.6 kB/s | 4.5 kB 00:00
Rocky Linux 9 - Extras 9.8 kB/s | 2.9 kB 00:00
Metadata cache created.
# dnf check-update
Last metadata expiration check: 0:00:12 ago on Mon Jul 24 12:04:37 2023.
# free -h
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 460Mi 96Mi 155Mi 3.0Mi 228Mi 363Mi
Swap: 0B 0B 0B
