If you have a system with only 4GB of RAM, you need to assign at least 2.5GB (2560M) to a virtual machine to install devstack . Even with this limited RAM there are times the devstack installation will fail.
One way to give the installation process an opportunity to complete is to configure your virtual machine to have swap space. The amount of swap space you can configure may be limited to the size of your initial disk partition configuration (which is 8GB). The following steps add a 2GB swap file to your virtual machine.
sudo swapon -s free -m sudo fallocate -l 2G /swapfile ls -lh /swapfile sudo chmod 600 /swapfile sudo mkswap /swapfile sudo swapon /swapfile sudo swapon -s free -m echo "/swapfile none swap sw 0 0" | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab cat /etc/fstab
The use of swap space by your virtual machine instead of available RAM will cause a significant slowdown of any software. For the purposes of a minimal installation this option provides a means to observe a running minimal OpenStack cloud.