> I'm not saying a 2 GB is unusable -- just that building a lot of software
takes a lot of RAM.

Why is this?  Generally, big programs are made up of many smaller modules;
seems to me, if you can compile the largest of the modules, you should be
able to compile the rest (of the smaller modules). esp with MAKE_JOBS=1

Divide and Conquer ?

(Apologies for asking a dumb question!)



On Thu, Sep 10, 2026 at 3:27 AM Greg Troxel <[email protected]> wrote:

> Riccardo Mottola <[email protected]> writes:
>
> > However, it was an overheating issue. I did blow off some dust in the
> > fan and put the ThinkPad on a laptop stand and it did compile
> > successfully through 8 hours.
>
> From reading lore over the years, I would expect that memory would just
> write or read incorrectly.  That doesn't lead to the kernel noticing
> anything and a line in dmesg.  Just programs getting wrong bits and
> blowing up.
>
> Maybe you can change your Thinkpad's hardware to use ECC RAM instead :-)
> But seriously, higher-end server motherboards take ECC RAM which helps
> with this, and provides diagnostics.
>
> Finally, 2 GB of RAM and 2 GB of swap are small for today's big
> software, and I'm surprised things are working as well as you report.
> In hindsight, that should have been in your initial request.
>
> I'm not saying a 2 GB is unusable -- just that building a lot of
> software takes a lot of RAM.
>

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