Bug 1000498

Summary:	i586 installer broken
Product:	[openSUSE] openSUSE Tumbleweed	Reporter:	Michal Suchanek <msuchanek>
Component:	Basesystem	Assignee:	E-mail List <yast2-maintainers>
Status:	RESOLVED INVALID	QA Contact:	E-mail List <qa-bugs>
Severity:	Normal
Priority:	P5 - None	CC:	msuchanek
Version:	Current
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	Other
OS:	Other
Whiteboard:
Found By:	---	Services Priority:
Business Priority:		Blocker:	---
Marketing QA Status:	---	IT Deployment:	---

Description Michal Suchanek 2016-09-22 16:47:19 UTC

I tried to install on an i586 class notebook

 - in the main menu (outside of installer) there is an option to run shell. It returns immediately.
 - there is a help text on terminal 9 saying shells are running on terminals 2 5 6 and 9. They are not
 - there is an e100 NIC in the notebook. The linuxrc claims it loaded e100 and eepro100 drivers during boot. It claims there is no network card when trying to configure network in the main menu. It claims there are no modules loaded in the same menu.

Comment 1 Chenzi Cao 2016-09-23 09:34:55 UTC

Hi Michal, would you please help to provide yast log? Thank you!

https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Bugreport_YaST

Comment 2 Michal Suchanek 2016-09-23 10:15:14 UTC

No. If you read the report you will see the installer is so broken there is no way to do anything in the installer. Unless you have some way to generate that report without a shell.

Comment 3 Stefan Hundhammer 2016-09-27 11:46:23 UTC

Please change the subject to something meaningful - which "is broken" is not.

Comment 4 Stefan Hundhammer 2016-09-27 12:19:41 UTC

Since there are no logs at all, also please describe what you did, and what went wrong at what time during that process: What did you expect to happen, and what actually happened.

Please elaborate where you did what:

- In the boot menu
- In linuxrc
- In the YaST installer

Comment 5 Michal Suchanek 2016-09-27 12:35:50 UTC

checking the amount of memory in the particular system reveals there is only 256 MB

So the installer error is probably due to low memory

Comment 6 Stefan Hundhammer 2016-09-27 13:31:27 UTC

I didn't find any clearly specified system requirements for Tumbleweed, but for SLE-12 (which is very much the same code base), here the minimum specs are 512 MB RAM:

https://www.suse.com/de-de/products/server/technical-information

Leap has even stricter requirements: 1 GB RAM

https://en.opensuse.org/Hardware_requirements

You might get lucky with 256 MB if you try a text-based (ncurses) installation and avoid the detailed software selection and probably also the expert partitioner, but that amount of memory is clearly out of spec these days.

Please notice that it's very difficult to come up with a useful error message in that case since things will fail in mysterious ways if we run out of memory: Creating objects in Ruby or C++ might fail, maybe external programs (parted, modprobe) fail. This is not good - we know that. But the only alternative  would be to get back to the hard check for available memory and to refuse to even start the installation, which OTOH would mean that you don't have a chance to even try a low-profile installation like described above (text only, no fancy things).