I've recently installed Hipster into a small VM with 1GB of RAM and wanted to 
update it from the February ISO state to current packages. What I found was 
that the virtual machine essentially froze in the process, and after a few 
increments of provided ram it succeeded when 2gb were dedicated (which is quite 
generous on an alas 4gb notebook).

During the 'pkg update' runs I saw that the process consumed over 900MB in 
virtual memory with about 600MB in RSS and lots of swapping occurred, at least 
during the Refresh-catalog and Solving stages. Something seems inefficient in 
this - the updates to download were less than this!

Did anyone else see such behavior?

Also, what should be the storage policy towards /var/pkg and in particular 
/var/pkg/publisher? It seems that the latter is a repo which stores copies of 
packages for the current BE and maybe also for new BE's that directly use this 
one as base for cloning (updates are fetched first, then a clone is made, and 
possibly the obsolete packages are removed from the cache). Overall this 
consumes quite a lot of space, which is not always easy to release without 
killing an older BE completely, so I womder if things can be optimized here 
somehow as well? 
In particular, I've tested with my split-rootfs procedure, that these both 
paths can be separated into datasets under each current rootfs, and it works 
for beadm clones. I guess it would make it easier to destroy old package caches 
when an rpool runs out of space, without necessarily destroying the relevant 
BE's. However, I am not yet certain what would happen when a booted or running 
BE would find itself with an empty /var/pkg/publishers - would it just re-fetch 
whatever it might need or would things crash badly? Should there be steps to 
reinitialize the cache after it is rudely deleted? 
Or conversely steps to gracefully purge it?

Also, am i correct to assume that /var/pkg and its other subdirectories hold 
info about the actual installed packages and for the os/pkg management to 
remain sane - these should not be 'purged'?

Thanks,
//Jim
--
Typos courtesy of K-9 Mail on my Samsung Android

_______________________________________________
OpenIndiana-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss

Reply via email to