zram swap size not big enough for dpkg-reconfigure locales

[BertLindeman]

Using ev3 image ev3dev-jessie-2015-12-30

Running dpkg-reconfigure locales (during an upgrade) suffers:

Generating locales (this might take a while)...
  en_US.UTF-8...Killed
 done
Generation complete.
*** update-locale: Error: invalid locale settings:  LANG=en_US.UTF-8

I know en_US.UTF8 already is the defauls as installed 😄

Looking at /proc/swaps I see the zram swap is getting full.

As a circumvention I used a swapfile (just for the locales):

fallocate -l 512M /swapfile
chmod 600 /swapfile
mkswap /swapfile
swapon /swapfile

During the generate '/proc/swaps`:

Filename                                Type            Size    Used    Priority
/dev/zram0                              partition       65532   65532   16383
/swapfile                               file            524284  27932   -1

After the locales update, remove the swapfile:

swapoff /swapfile
rm /swapfile

In fact just reporting this for the circumvention.

[dlech]

That is crazy that it take up so much RAM.

[WasabiFan]

In my tests, this took upwards of a minute to load.

[dlech]

so it ran for you without error?

[WasabiFan]

Me? The menu loads after I wait 30-60 seconds, but I haven't tried actually changing the locale.

[dlech]

I've increased the zram swap size so this might have a chance of working now.

zraminit 3.5ev3dev2

[BertLindeman]

Possibly related: I mounted some directories to tmpfs trying to protect my sd-card:

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
tmpfs            31M     0   31M   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs            31M  9.0M   22M  30% /run
tmpfs           5.3M  4.1k  5.3M   1% /run/lock
tmpfs            31M     0   31M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs           105M     0  105M   0% /var/spool/cups
tmpfs           105M     0  105M   0% /var/cache/logwatch
tmpfs           105M     0  105M   0% /var/cache/apt/archives
tmpfs            21M  283k   21M   2% /var/log

This way I might loose some logging doing this.
I accept that.

Before update:
Current situation:
'cat /proc/swaps shows:

Filename                                Type            Size    Used    Priority
/dev/zram0                              partition       65532   20040   16383

update:

The following packages will be upgraded:
   zram-init (3.5ev3dev1 => 3.5ev3dev2)

systemctl restart zram_swap.service
cat /proc/swaps

Filename                                Type            Size    Used    Priority
/dev/zram0                              partition       98300   0       16383

Retry time dpkg-reconfigure locales
Seen:

Filename                                Type            Size    Used    Priority
/dev/zram0                              partition       98300   94124   16383
/dev/zram0                              partition       98300   94440   16383
/dev/zram0                              partition       98300   95096   16383
/dev/zram0                              partition       98300   98256   16383

And ready 😄 Pffffffff, close . .

Terminal shows:

Generating locales (this might take a while)...
  en_US.UTF-8... done
Generation complete.

real    10m19.865s
user    1m30.050s
sys     2m27.020s

So: WORKS!
Thank you David

[dlech]

Wow, what will you do with those extra 4 bytes?

If you are interested, you can setup another zram device for tmpfs. There is a service for this in the zram-init package. It is just turned off. https://github.com/ev3dev/zram-init/blob/ev3dev-jessie/systemd/system/zram_tmp.service. You will have to modify the kernel command line in /etc/default/flash-kernel to get more zram devices.