CentOS 8 Stream installation with Foreman 2.3.5

Problem: Installation CentOS 8 Stream via PXE-Boot and Foreman and 2 GB of RAM is not possible, see attached screenshot.

“No space left on device” with dracut-initqueue

Expected outcome: Installation should be possible

Welcome back.

Your initramdisk seems to be corrupted, delete the initrd.img from the TFTP directory and try again. Stream changes PXE files quite often, we have merged a patch yesterday to solve this. It will be in Foreman 3.1.

https://github.com/theforeman/smart-proxy/pull/799

Hi @lzap

Well…i have some doubt about that.
When i change the VM RAM to 4 GB the boot is possible.

Turning the VM off, setting RAM to 2 GB, turning on, then the installation brakes (screenshot).

I have seen this in the past and can confirm that it is a problem with the amount of RAM and since I was hit by this last week too I can also confirm that 2 GB is not enough. The RAM usage is steadily growing for the installer, when I first wrote our training material I recommended 1.5 GB, then 2 GB and now it seems like even this is not enough anymore. :frowning:

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Report on Red Hat Bugzilla, this is Anaconda’s problem not ours.

This is actually mentioned in system requirements - for PXE using HTTP(s)/NFS, a 3GB RAM is required for RHEL8+, while RHEL7 requires 1.5G RAM.

However this may be just a soft limit, because I am kickstarting my VMs from NFS and VMs have only 2GB RAM. Tested Alma, CentOS 8 + 8 Stream + 9 Stream, Rocky, RHEL 8 + RHEL 9.

Source:
RHEL 7 requirements
RHEL 8 requirements

It could be a Foreman thing actually, I tested very quickly deploying VMs using virt-install and it worked. Is there any additional memory requirement for Foreman when kickstarting over HTTP/NFS?

Yes, the memory requirement is tested by Red Hat with the typical installation. But with Foreman, you likely have much more complex kickstart with additional %post sections (installing Puppet, running Puppet etc). It will require more memory for sure.

How much? I don’t know. Make sure to make at least 4 GB VMs for kickstarting, then you can lower it down when necessary.

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