I think you write a script to do all the WATCH-STOP-CONTINUE stuff. e.g. memwatch bitbake core-image-minimal Options could be added. e.g. memwatch --interval 5 --logfile test.log bitbake core-image-minimal This script first becomes a session leader, then forks to start the 'bitbake' command as its child process. Then, every several seconds (say 10s by default), it checks the current memory usage, and according to its policy, determines whether to stop/continue some process or not. For stopping the process, you can first get all its child process by simply using the 'ps' command. e.g. $ ps o vsize,comm,pid -s 28303 | sort -n -r 317284 emacs 12883 28912 ps 36302 26248 sort 36303 21432 man 24797 17992 bash 28303 9852 pager 24807 VSZ COMMAND PID Then skip the bitbake processes, stop the first one that uses the largest memory, record its PID. For continuing processes, just start it according to the records. Maybe using FILO by default? Best Regards, Chen Qi
Yeah, so we would be having memwatch as a baby sitter.
I would be nicer to have it built into bitbake, but this would work too.
On 04/11/2021 11:23 PM, Gmane Admin wrote:
My build machine has 8 cores + HT so bitbake enthusiastically assumes 16. However I have (only?) 16GB of RAM (+24GB swap space).
16GB of RAM has always been more then enough with 4 core + HT, but now building certain recipes (nodejs, but rust will probably do it as well) eats up more memory then there actually is RAM causing excessive swapping.
In fact the swapping is so excessive that just this single recipe determines largely the total image build time. However restricting bitbake (or actually parallel make) to use only 4 cores + HT sounds also like a waste.
I know this has been looked at in the past, but I think it needs fundamental resolving (other then, hé, why not add just another stick of memory).
What I do manually when I run into swapping so bad my desktop becomes unresponsive is ssh from another machine and then stop (not kill) the processes that use the most memory.
These then get swapped out, but not back in, allowing the remaining tasks to complete without swapping. Then when sufficient memory becomes free again I continue the stopped processes.
Isn't this something that could be added to bitbake to automate using memory efficiently?
