Calamares installer - frequently crashing

Lately there has been several reports of the installer crashing.

One theory is this has become an issue with the lastest ISO which sports the new animated slideshow.

Another theory is the ever increasing size of the ISO - Xfce minimal is 3G - and the resources needed on the target system for unpacking the squashfs in memory to be able to run the installer.

The Manjaro MHWD is largely responsible for increased ISO size as I have been able to get a LXQt ISO slimmed down to 1.6G by using only the free drivers.

While it is not consistent for real hardware - I have been able to recreate the issue at will using VirtualBox vm with 2GB ram using the Plasma full ISO.

When looking at dmesg after the installer crash it can be seen this is the OOM killer at work.

[   53.167113] oom-kill:constraint=CONSTRAINT_NONE,nodemask=(null),cpuset=/,mems_allowed=0,global_oom,task_memcg=/user.slice/user-1000.slice/user@1000.service/app.slice/app-gnome-manjaro\x2dhello-1309.scope,task=calamares,pid=1708,uid=0
[   53.167154] Out of memory: Killed process 1708 (calamares) total-vm:2415948kB, anon-rss:866280kB, file-rss:0kB, shmem-rss:2832kB, UID:0 pgtables:2404kB oom_score_adj:200
[   55.353984] oom_reaper: reaped process 1708 (calamares), now anon-rss:0kB, file-rss:0kB, shmem-rss:36kB

What are your thoughts?

Do you think this warrants a rebuild of the official ISO reverting to the previous slideshow?

Do we need to rethink the ISO profiles?

Perhaps the time has come for a new approach to apply Nvidia drivers.

Perhaps when mhwd tool can download the necessary packages instead of including them on the ISO?

Perhaps an after install to setup non-free gpu?

References

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As a relative newcomer to Manjaro I must say that I was surprised how much “stuff” was on the iso. For test and install purposes you don’t need everything and most things can easily be added post install. I removed nearly a half a gig of 32bit libraries from a 64bit install. Should they be available, sure, but they do not need to be on the iso.

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Except the new branding/slideshow there was not much done with Calamares lately …