Re: Hmmm... /boot is too small. what's the best way to increase it's size?
On Sat 09 May 2020 at 20:05:48 (-0700), Rick Thomas wrote:
> I recently did a "apt update ; apt upgrade" and it died for lack of space in /boot when trying to install the latest kernel.
>
> I purged a couple of old kernel packages (still present in the 'stable' repo, so they weren't obsolete) to make enough space and tried again. Worked this time, but I would have liked to have the old kernels around as fallbacks just in case of a regression...
>
> Here's the disk layout:
>
> rbthomas@milli:~$ lsblk
> NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
> sda 8:0 0 111.8G 0 disk
> ├─sda1 8:1 0 512M 0 part /boot/efi
> ├─sda2 8:2 0 244M 0 part /boot
> └─sda3 8:3 0 111.1G 0 part
> ├─debian--vg-root 253:0 0 28G 0 lvm /
> ├─debian--vg-swap_1 253:1 0 7.9G 0 lvm [SWAP]
> └─debian--vg-home 253:2 0 75.2G 0 lvm /home
> sdb 8:16 1 239G 0 disk
> └─sdb1 8:17 1 239G 0 part /media/rbthomas/Spare
> mmcblk0 179:0 0 238.3G 0 disk
> └─mmcblk0p1 179:1 0 238.3G 0 part /media/rbthomas/Downloads
> rbthomas@milli:~$
>
> rbthomas@milli:~$ df -HTP | grep -v tmpfs
> Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> /dev/mapper/debian--vg-root ext4 30G 9.9G 19G 36% /
> /dev/sda2 ext2 248M 78M 158M 34% /boot
> /dev/sda1 vfat 536M 144k 536M 1% /boot/efi
> /dev/mapper/debian--vg-home ext4 79G 4.4G 71G 6% /home
> /dev/sdb1 ext4 252G 63M 239G 1% /media/rbthomas/Spare
> /dev/mmcblk0p1 ext4 251G 63M 238G 1% /media/rbthomas/Downloads
> rbthomas@milli:~$
>
>
> What's the best way to increase the size of /boot ?
>
> I can easily create a gig or so of space by a shrink/resize of /home, but how do I add that space to /dev/sda2 ?
>
> I can't just move up the end of /dev/sda2 = start of /dev/sda3 without backing up and restoring, can I?
Apparently you have at least two kernels in under 80M, so one wonders
how many you need to have available for booting at any one moment.
If the answer is many, you could shrink some of them by rebuilding
their initrd.img files with MODULES=dep, which could reduce each
kernel's size from ~40M to <10M.
75G for /home is pretty small (the only disk I have that small is a
2004 laptop) so I'd look for an opportunity to repartition in the
near to mid-term. (Is this one that you've converted to sysv, for
example, or is it encrypted—excuses like that.)
All of which assumes that you actually need a separate /boot …
… and that you didn't repartition it already, before dawn.
Cheers,
David.
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