Installing geth on Raspberry Pi 3 - cannot allocate memory error

Question

I've been using this script to attempt to install geth on a Raspberry Pi 3.

It seems to work ok until part way through the build:

pi@raspberrypi:~/go-ethereum $ make geth
build/env.sh go run build/ci.go install ./cmd/geth
>>> /usr/lib/go-1.7/bin/go install -ldflags -X main.gitCommit=bdef758d5c6d397584d0c35e53d6f6c318e61351 -v ./cmd/geth
github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/cmd/geth
# github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/cmd/geth
/usr/lib/go-1.7/pkg/tool/linux_arm/link: running gcc failed: fork/exec /usr/bin/gcc: cannot allocate memory

util.go:43: exit status 2
exit status 1
Makefile:15: recipe for target 'geth' failed
make: *** [geth] Error 1

It is saying cannot allocate memory - there is ~8GiB free on the SD card (1GB RAM).

Can anyone recreate this error? What tips are there for debugging/fixing?

N.b. This question is similar to Installing ethereum node on Raspberry pi errors.

Also, a similar problem was reported here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/cloud-print-connector/zF_xyViClLM

Answer 1

What tips are there for debugging/fixing?

These suggestions aren't specific to Ethereum/Geth/etc., but they may be of use to someone seeing the same problem in future.

The error was complaining about a lack of memory. (Where "memory" means RAM, not harddisk space.)

/usr/lib/go-1.7/pkg/tool/linux_arm/link: running gcc failed: fork/exec 
/usr/bin/gcc: cannot allocate memory

Even if you know how much memory your system has, first check how much of it is actually available:

• free -h, or
• cat /proc/meminfo | grep MemFree

If there's what you'd consider to be not enough, see if you can free any up by assessing which processes are using it:

• top, then M to order by memory use.

Once you've selected any non-critical processes you don't need, kill them:

• kill -15 <pid>, where pid is the process id.

(Note we're using signal number -15, which equates to SIGTERM, rather than -9, which is SIGKILL. This way we give the process a chance to be notified of the signal - if it has a handler installed - and clean up gracefully.)

Answer 2

FWIW I found this answer: https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/70/how-to-set-up-swap-space and was able to compile and run geth on a Rasp B with 512 MB ram