Installation issue, v9, small hard drive as cause?

[smarm]

Trying to install to a 4g flash drive (I don't have any 8g on hand).

Minimal installation (as per my testing) with XFCE desktop, Samba, Web server, etc, takes ~3g of space.

Attempting to install to VMWare, works well (~10g hard drive). Install to Esxi, works well (10g & 20g tested). Install to flash drive? Installer locks up or is VERY slow. This is not when the installer is first launched, but rather on the "Installation" step. other configuration steps previous to this work normally and have no unusual delay, etc. It appears to first appear when the step for "Installing Meta-Package: Base System" appears (unable to confirm consumed space on drive).

Testing shows I can vary the hard drive size in VMWare to 8g but no lower, or I experience the issue.

(Potentially) Helpful information:

• Using normal 64bit DVD (not live)
• Using latest (MD5 hash verify) ISO
• No physical media used only locally sourced organic ISO
• Appears to effect both DVD and Internet sources for installation media (the options in the installer)
• Using ZFS root file system
• Using the entire drive
• Installer will respond (after several minutes) to attempting to use parts of the UI (e.g. pressing "help" or "abort", will show the normal prompts, just with excessive delay)
• Attempting to drop to console does work (slowly)
• An error appears on ttyv0: "ERROR: Failed to start GUI installer with detected driver... Trying VESA mode"
• Attempting to use other TTY's show a login prompt, entering information into the console is extremely delayed (several minutes to enter text in some circumstances)
• Tested RAM configurations: 512mb, 1g, 2g.

Similar issues appear here, but no resolution: 1, 2, 3, 4.

Honestly, it sound like the installation is starved of resources or thrashing.

Perhaps the installer in sub 4g installation profile's have their swap set too low or off?

I assume the install process mirrors that of FreeBSD and there are actually "make install"s going on in the background. Thus temporary files, thus more space than reported is being used if the cleanup process is not aggressive enough between builds. Fair assumption?

Downloading and attempting to use a "live" version to use this troubleshooting, but won't be able to test until tomorrow.

[Cobalt]

I have a 16GB flash drive, 16GB of RAM and an Intel Core i7-2600K processor and the installer locks up on me, too. Not that I need to use PC-BSD on a flash drive, I was just experimenting.

I haven't messed with the live DVD for awhile. I wonder how it would behave if it were written to a flash drive with the dd command?

[smarm]

More to come, but I can confirm the live version (when attempting to install) does lockup / slow similarly.

Initial testing shows system is responding and appears to be functional:

• 'top' (command) shows no excessive activity of processes (100% idle)
• 28mb memory free (upped to 4g for testing and loading of live environment)(this was ~84mb free before started install process)
• 12m swap used (256mb total)
• Last step taken before stall / lock up "starting extraction" as per pc-sysinstall.log
• In both normal install and live install the lock up appears at ~14% with either internet download or DVD as source. This appears to be when the main system is installed or the image is extracted.
• /var/log/messages nothing helpful

(I can provide log dumps as required, just requires a bit more time than I have right now to copy them over in a reasonable fashion)

As a side note, this installer is progressing very slowly, but does not appear to be locked up; As from previous tests. Not sure of the work it's doing, but the installer percentage UI has incremented ~1% every 2 hours as I check on it.

Something curious though:

A "df" shows a "/dev/md1.uzip" and "/dev/md3.uzip" which are mounted on "/mntuzip" and "/mnt.uzip" respectively. Given the logs and "top", I believe this the image extraction "workspace", but the space is huge. Both have space allocated at ~26g and are consuming ~5.4g (about the size of the my flash drive). Nothing on this system is that size or could support that size. What are these spaces and why are they taking up such a large amount of allocate space? Are they sparse?

Other testing to try going forward:

Try with a larger flash drive
Try with a hard drive that is ~4g
Try with a live system (rather than doing it through VMWare) (have to download a new installer from USB to do this)

Other than that, not sure what else to try rather than doing some complex and clever to "force" the installer to work.

[smarm]

I did a bit more work.

Attempted a FreeBSD install (~300mb when finished) and simply tried to install from ports.

One of the items I'm looking to install is Samba, which when building takes up ~2g (!) of space on the drive. This only (during the "make install" step) caused the drive to run out of space.

Since the fully installed is ~3g with Samba, I assume a "make clean" after the "make install" process would clean that up a bit, but there's simply not enough space to do an installation of Samba (with dependencies) on such a small drive with all the working material that is required to set it up.

This may be solvable with another who's BSD-foo is stronger than mine, but I'll leave it to them.

So it appears that PC-BSD cannot build correctly if the space on the drive is consumed during the installation process of a minimal installation + Samba. I can tell that the drive itself is being written to in some fashion, so I assume that the issue for the "stalls" / "freezes" / "slowness" is similar; But I have no logging information to back it up (at least that I know of).

If required I do have a snapshot of a PC-BSD install exactly at the point of failure of the installation, saved on my VMWare infrastructure. I'll post the log files here later.

But in future (PC-BSD dev's, ahem), it would be helpful to know how much memory / space would be needed at maximum to complete the install process even if the final installed space is less than the "build space" required as we've seen here.

The minimum for building for a minimal set of applications appears to be ~10g.

[smarm]

Just finished an install to a 16g flash drive, worked normally.

Configuration was XFCE + Samba, for a total size of 6.5g; Oddly. Previous testing showed consumed as much smaller with similar configurations.

Ports was included in both this and other testing environments, though only taking up ~400m on my correct USB install.

There are, I assume, other packages installed if there is room for them as compared to the smaller environments I've tested with...