Not Enough disk space (/boot) [Upgrade Kubuntu from 23.04 to 23.10]

[graemev]

Following the instructions at: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Ma...grades/Kubuntu .

I get a popup "Not enough disk space" ..needs 281M of free space on disk /boot ...please free an additional 102M of disk space

Seems clear. However running apt-get autoremove removes nothing (there are only 2 kernels + 2 initrd) the root cause is that /boot is just too small.
There is a similar issue posted against ubuntu , the "solution" being to re-install..because your partition dates from a very old distro.

Well my boot is:

491M

And indeed it's painfully small, I need to run apt-get autoremove a lot. HOWEVER

This is a recent kubuntu 23.04 install. I installed it on a laptop I bought in May this year (2023) so less than 6 months since the first ever install (no upgrades)

My default for /boot is 1GB , so I'm guessing this was the value chosen by the the installer.

I'm thinking, I'll just remove the separate /boot , but if this is the "default" install (with separate /boot) there could be a lot of breakages to come.


ABTW:

/etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf contains:

COMPRESS=zstd

Again I did not chose this value.

[Schwarzer Kater]

I didn't understand if you did this, but I think it is best to not let any installation program choose the size of partitions. Best to do it yourself with e.g. a GParted live USB stick.
I recommend 2 GB for /boot nowadays (to be on the safe side for a while…), if /boot is needed.

[oshunluvr]

Not really following all your post comments, but if you only need 102 MB just remove the second kernel. If the one you're using works and you're going to upgrade - which will include a new kernel - why the second kernel?

Almost no one has a separate /boot anymore. The need for that "died" a decade ago or more. IME no Ubuntu (or flavors) installer creates a separate /boot. UEFI requires partition for it's files, but it's not "/boot" it's /boot/efi. Not the same thing. My /boot/efi is 512MB with 506MB free on a single boot system.

COMPRESS=zstd is the default compression of initramfs theses days and I don't see how that related to your lack of drive space.

If you do indeed have a separate /boot, get rid of it. Boot to a live USB, move the files from the /boot partition to the main partition /boot folder, edit fstab and grub.cfg so you can boot without /boot, run update-grub to adjust all the boot menu entries, then upgrade.

[Schwarzer Kater]

Not really following all your post comments, but if you only need 102 MB just remove the second kernel. If the one you're using works and you're going to upgrade - which will include a new kernel - why the second kernel? […]

This might be a really good and easy solution.

[graemev]

but I think it is best to not let any installation program choose the size of partitions

As I say, I don't generally, must have missed this one. This was the reason for posting. It was a recent install and it looks like I followed the defaults albeit choosing a separate /boot ... so you may be seeing a lot of these style of failure.

COMPRESS=zstd is the default compression of initramfs theses days and I don't see how that related to your lack of drive space.

Part of the pop-up message suggest that xz should be set here (by way of making more space)

Almost no one has a separate /boot anymore. The need for that "died" a decade ago or more.

I generally choose a separate (and generous) /boot to protect from rogue user scripts eating all the space. The common use case being /home and /boot share a partition . Somebody goes off-piste with a script an fills up their home (and thus root partition) later an update-initramfs(8) fails and that can get messy.

[graemev]

OK I've managed to switch to a single filesystem (for root and boot) ...way more complicated than I'd expected:

If anybody is interested: https://unix.stackexchange.com/quest...-boot-partiton

[graemev]

The actual upgrade went poorly, I'll post separately