Running Transaction Test… Killed

If you come across ‘yum’ suddenly dying during an operation with this message, this is likely the linux OOM killer doing it’s job. The problem at hand is that the machine you’re working on has very limited RAM, or SWAP is disabled. When the machine is nearing RAM capacity the OOM killer takes care of taking down the offender.

I first came across this working with a machine in ‘rescue’ mode, which has SWAP disabled by default. Enabling it took care of the problem.

If you run ‘dmesg’, you’ll be able to see something like the following:
Out of memory: Killed process XXXX, UID 0 (yum).

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