HAOS upgrade beyond 11.1 gets OOM killed on my 4GB Rpi4 - is that expected to work?

Installation Home Assistant OS
1

Hello,
My Home Assistant has been stuck on HAOS 11.1 and HA Core 2024.11.3. I have a permanent notification to upgrade both. When I click upgrade on either, it spins for a while, then eventually Home Assistant goes offline, coming online occasionally then dropping off again, until I go press ctrl-alt-delete and force a reboot. After it comes back up from the reboot, I can see a bunch of OOMKills in the logs at the end of the previous boot, starting about two minutes after I started the upgrade.

I’m on HAOS on a Raspberry Pi 4 with 4GB of memory. I can see there are 2.3GB free when I login with SSH, right before pressing upgrade:

$ free -h               
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           3.7Gi       801Mi       2.2Gi       1.3Mi       920Mi       3.0Gi
Swap:          1.2Gi          0B       1.2Gi

Is this expected to work with that much memory? Do I need to buy a bigger pi? I’ve obviously been avoiding dealing with this for some time, but now that I’m looking at it. I’m surprised to find an OOMKill of all things. I would expect the upgrade process not to require 2GB of memory. If this is expected to work, what should I do?

2

What apps and integrations do you have installed? Demanding ones like VSCode? Any errant entires or devices? Is network speeds good? Any bugs in the system log? How is your CPU usage?

3

Definitely nothing like VSCode. I have Advanced SSH& Web Terminal, File Editor, Prometheus Node Exporter, Z-Wave JS and an app that I’ve been building on and off to allow me to push codes to my Z-Wave locks. The custom one is a small go process that shouldn’t use much in the way of resources, and I stopped it before starting the upgrade just in case.

I posted the output of free to show that there’s plenty of memory available.

4

Your memory stats are useful, but only give a snapshot from when you took them. A point in time.

Can you post the system log, suitably formatted, from before the upgrade is initiated till after it comes back up again?

5

Upgrade was at approximately 06:24:55, about 5 minutes after this log starts. ctrl-alt-delete was around 06:29:55. This doesn’t include the logs after it reboots, I can grab those if needed.

I tried to post it inline but the forum said:

An error occurred: Body is limited to 32000 characters; you entered 367575

so here’s a pastebin: 2025-12-27 06:20:13.043 home-assistant kernel: kauditd_printk_skb: 68 callbacks - Pastebin.com

6

Try restarting in safe mode then do the updates.

7

Ah sorry I should have mentioned: i tried that. I can do it again and post logs if that helps.

8

Ah ok.

You could go through the rigmarole of doing a fresh install and copying your entire config folder (including the hidden .storage folder) from a previously downloaded unencrypted backup. But that probably won’t help with future updates, and you’d have to also do a partial backup restore for your add-ons. Too much faffing about.

I’d open an issue in the core repository. GitHub · Where software is built . Possibly the OS repository too: GitHub · Where software is built

9

I have filed an issue on GitHub. Hopefully I’ll be able to upgrade eventually.

10

Don’t use a link to this topic for the information. Edit the issue and put all the information there, your logs the fact that you tried safe mode, etc…

11

Thanks! I have updated the issue to include the host log and the information about free memory before running the upgrade. Let me know if you think there are any other details I should include.

12

Is your installation plain vanilla onto a Raspberry Pi, or on top of docker and VMs?

Have you ‘tweaked’ any of the container parameters? Set upper and lower limits to try and tune your memory usage by Linux?

Do you have any non-standard network parameters such as VLANs, DDNS, or anything else that sits under your network connection to the Raspberry Pi?

How long will your log survive in PasteBin?

A safe mode boot and update will destroy the evidence. Maybe wait for a response on GitHub?

13

Is your installation plain vanilla onto a Raspberry Pi, or on top of docker and VMs?

yes, a plain pi image. I downloaded it from the Home Assistant website. I deliberately did not do anything abnormal in an effort to avoid things like this.

Have you ‘tweaked’ any of the container parameters? Set upper and lower limits to try and tune your memory usage by Linux?

definitely not

Do you have any non-standard network parameters such as VLANs, DDNS, or anything else that sits under your network connection to the Raspberry Pi?

nope

How long will your log survive in PasteBin?

6 months on pastebin, forever on github (i used gist.github.com for the issue)