It shouldn’t be a common issue that one wants to install a development suite such as Vivado in a system with not a lot of memory. But it so happens that I tried it on my laptop with 8 GB physical RAM and only 2 GB swap space. The error that the installer shows is not very helpful:
# ./Xilinx_Vivado_SDK_Web_2017.4_1216_1_Lin64.bin
Verifying archive integrity… All good.
Uncompressing Xilinx Installer………………………………………………………………………………..
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INFO : Log file location – /root/.Xilinx/xinstall/xinstall_1543839793529.log./xsetup: line 71: 16291 Killed ${X_JAVA_HOME}/bin/java ${ARGS} -splash:${root}/data/images/splash.png -jar ${root}/lib/classes/xinstaller.jar
But ‘dmesg’ shows much more useful information:
[1459339.152707] Out of memory: Kill process 16291 (java) score 168 or sacrifice child
[1459339.152760] Killed process 16291 (java) total-vm:5680084kB, anon-rss:1753772kB, file-rss:0kB, shmem-rss:1024kB
[1459339.263118] oom_reaper: reaped process 16291 (java), now anon-rss:0kB, file-rss:0kB, shmem-rss:1024kB
Hence, the solution was to just close Firefox and Thunderbird, which had been running for a while (months?).