Question

[This question is essentially reopening git crash during rebase which never had an answer]

I’m attempting to a rebase from my ‘secc’ branch as:

$ git rebase main
First, rewinding head to replay your work on top of it...
fatal: Out of memory, malloc failed (tried to allocate 553656577 bytes)         # about 0.5 GB
$ git rebase --abort
No rebase in progress?

The failure is related to the fact that both branches and their common ancestor have three .dat files each of which is 0.5 GB.

How can I do a rebase in this situation?

Additional info:

• A ‘git merge main’ works just fine.
• Augmenting .gitattributes with ‘*.dat merge=keepTheirs’ did not prevent the fatal.
• The *.dat files do differ.
• I’m willing to remove the *.dat files to rebase the others and then add back the *.dat. But how?
• I’m using git 1.7.9.4

Answer 1

You won’t know if your machine is big enough until failing on the ‘git rebase’ but by that point your directory is in a munged state. During the rebase another branch was checked out (main) so that the ‘secc’ changes could be applied to it. Recover, and proceed with:

git checkout secc

Having failed on the rebase, as you’ve noted you’ve got two options:

1. If rebase is not required, go with ‘git merge main’
2. Get a bigger machine and retry ‘git rebase main’

You don’t have a practical option to ignore the 0.5GB files, do the rebase, and then get those giga files back.