[FS#120] opkg fails with Out of memory on a device with 32 MB of RAM

[LEDE Bugs]

The following task has a new comment added:

FS#120 - opkg fails with Out of memory on a device with 32 MB of RAM
User who did this - Christian Hamar (worgenrage)

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Hey there! Got this problem too with a ver 1.X (4MB / 32MB) tplink 1043ND router.

On some forums there was a suggestion for opkg vfork* mem error.

sysctl -w vm.min_free_kbytes=0

when i used this and run opkg update then Packages list updated. I can see a couple of packages via opkg list-upgradable .

But. I can upgrade small packages, such as odhcpd or odhcpd6 or luci-proto-ppp *

But when i want to run opkg upgrade luci-base or luci-theme-bootstrap* (eg. bigger than ~10kb) then it just stuck at downloading.

root at OpenWrt:/tmp# opkg upgrade luci-mod-admin-full
Upgrading luci-mod-admin-full on root from git-17.025.85178-472dc4b-1 to git-17.033.24085-e306ee6-1...
Downloading http://downloads.lede-project.org/releases/17.01.0-rc1/packages/mips_24kc/luci/luci-mod-admin-full_git-17.033.24085-e306ee6-1_mips_24kc.ipk.

When i go to /tmp and do an ls -la then i see that there is an opkg-XYJkfds tmp dir for this package. I check that. I got the .ipk file already downloaded for full size and a temporary directory. Probably that should be where .ipk extracted.

Nah thats empty. Router working fine i can terminate opkg only via killing the process.

btw

root at OpenWrt:/tmp# df -h
Filesystem                Size      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root                 2.3M      2.3M         0 100% /rom
tmpfs                    13.8M    988.0K     12.8M   7% /tmp
/dev/mtdblock3            4.4M      1.5M      2.9M  34% /overlay
overlayfs:/overlay        4.4M      1.5M      2.9M  34% /
tmpfs                   512.0K         0    512.0K   0% /dev

What information i can provide to the team about this "bug"? :) 

(btw, with owrt 15.0X version i did not have this problem on this router, so wondering)

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More information can be found at the following URL:
https://bugs.lede-project.org/index.php?do=details&task_id=120#comment1619