Had an annoying problem today where a Fedora x86_64 guest wouldn’t install on my CentOS KVM server. Weirdly the i386 version had installed perfectly, but the x86_64 version would repeatedly crash and chew up heaps of CPU at the software package selection screen.

Stuck here, unresponsive console, no mouse, etc?

Turns out that 512MB of RAM isn’t enough to install Fedora x86_64, but is enough to get away with installing Fedora i386 on. Simply boost the RAM allocation of the VM up to 1GB, and the installation will proceed OK. You can drop the RAM allocation down again afterwards.

Unsure why the installer dies in such a strange fashion, I would have expected Linux’s OOM to terminate the installer and leave me with a clear message, but maybe Anaconda is doing something weird like OOM protection and just ends up with the system running out of memory and hanging.