Error report: snapcraft fails on host with 1 GiB of memory

[Jayschwa]

Launching a VM.
launch failed: qemu-system-x86_64: cannot set up guest memory 'pc.ram': Cannot allocate memory

An error occurred when trying to launch the instance with 'multipass': returned exit code 2.
Ensure that 'multipass' is setup correctly and try again.

The host was running Ubuntu 18.04.2 and free showed that it had 700+ megabytes available.

1. Given that the host Ubuntu was not taking up much memory, I would expect that the VM snapcraft created (which is also Ubuntu, right?) should be fine as well.
2. After a brief search, I could not find any guidance on how to troubleshoot this error. Is it possible to configure multipass or qemu to use less memory?

[Lin-Buo-Ren]

Checkout the SNAPCRAFT_BUILD_ENVIRONMENT_MEMORY environment variable:

Environment variables that Snapcraft consumes

NOTE: This table is NOT complete nor error-free, feel free to extend/fix it. Environment variables are mostly for experimental/internal usage and shouldn’t be considered stable Name & Description Typical Values SNAPCRAFT_BUILD_ENVIRONMENT Refer The SNAPCRAFT_BUILD_ENVIRONMENT environment variable for more info [host|managed-host|multipass] (The value lxd has been obsoleted in Snapcraft 3.0 new syntax) SNAPCRAFT_BUILD_ENVIRONMENT_DISK The allocated virtual storage size for the VM…

by default it allocates 2GiB (the documentation is wrong but I currently can’t fix it)

One of the downside of a VM build is that it will always allocate all memory even if the guest OS isn’t use much. You might want to try building it in an LXD container instead.

[Jayschwa]

That does the trick. Thank you.

[Kepler]

Perfect. Thank you

[earlvanze]

Resolve snapcraft virtual memory exhausted

You can bump up the VM’s memory to 4GB with:

snapcraft clean # Rebuild VM
export SNAPCRAFT_BUILD_ENVIRONMENT_MEMORY=4G
snapcraft --debug