Excessive memory usage in pkg 2.4.2

[mohd-akram]

I'm currently trying to upgrade to FreeBSD 15. pkg upgrade keeps getting killed by the OS for using too much memory. See attached screenshots. Note that there's nothing else running on the system. This issue has only started happening recently.

[bapt]

I agree this is a bit exessive how many packages do you have installed?

[mohd-akram]

In this case I was doing a force upgrade of everything, so ~300 packages.

[Crest]

I encountered the same memory usage problem a small Atom board with 4GiB RAM + 2GiB swap running nothing but cron, syslogd and sshd. It ran out of memory trying to upgrade a FreeBSD 14.3/amd64 package base system with a complete base system installed.

The kernel killed the pkg process at about the worst possible point of of the upgrade with libc and rtld uninstalled. I managed to recover the system using the existing root shell and commands from /rescue to find the invoke pkg-static with the right arguments for -o ABI and -o OSVERSION needed because the auto detection failed.

I've been dog fooding FreeBSD including package base for long enough to come up with the solution in 5 minutes and apply it in 5 more minutes, but I'm afraid most users would've been royally fucked and wouldn't have known how to recover without a USB stick.

Since that experience I started used bectl for all package base upgrades. First I create a new boot environment for the new patch level e.g. bectl create 15.0p1 then I start it as a jail bectl -o allow.chflags=true -o ip4=inherit -o ip6=inherit 15.0p1, then I use a second jail to mount a complete devfs into the boot env mount -t devfs devfs /tmp/be*/dev, then I use pkg -j 15.0p1 upgrade -r FreeBSD-base to update the boot enviroment, and activate it with bectl activate 15.0p1. Unlike only using boot envs as backups in case something goes wrong this approach won't break the currently running system if pkg(8) crashes.

[grahamperrin]

sysctl vm.pageout_oom_seq

If the value is 12, then try 120 before the next attempt to upgrade.