Reduce number of old kernels retained

sebastian-brandt

Since two updates, I started running out of /boot space on Solus updates:

Failed to install initrd /boot/initrd-com.solus-project.current.<some version>: No space left on device

Because of that, I now need to manually remove old kernel and initrd files from /boot before updating which is a bit annoying.

Solus seems to keep 3 kernel versions (latest one and two older ones) around on /boot for current and lts each.

Can I somehow configure Solus to just retain one older kernel and initrd file for current and lts each?

Note: Because I wanted LUKS system encryption, Solus installed on LVM and the /boot partition is only 280 MB (the default from installation). I have the lts and and current kernel installed. No EFI.

marcvg

I also would like to know how we can safely remove old entries from /boot/efi/com.solus-project

sebastian-brandt

I now believe there is no such option. I looked into the sources and though I didn't understand much, it seems to me that clr-boot-manager retains the currently running, the default and the "last-known-good" kernels. Which kind of makes sense.

So it's either happy kernel deleting before every update from now on or resizing the /boot partition to a sensible size (like 512MB). But since in my case the partition following /boot is LUKS encrypted LVM and I've read it's discouraged to fiddle with its size and I don't want to reinstall...

nathanpainchaud

sebastian-brandt While I think a bigger /boot partition would be the best solution in your case, I can understand why you don't want to thread those waters. However, there is one thing I find suspicious with the kernels your system retains. In my experience, Solus ever only retains the latest and previous release of a kernel branch. So I don't know what happened in your case that caused your system to keep 2 older releases.

If you investigate and fix that, maybe that would be sufficient so that you don't have to manually bother with cleaning up your /boot partition every kernel update?

And as another option, have you considered only keeping one kernel branch installed?

sebastian-brandt

nathanpainchaud Thank you, maybe something got mixed up in my system. I'll clean up the boot partition (keeping only the latest current and lts kernel version) and see if the system keeps only 2 versions in the future on updates!

SuperJC710e

I agree with @nathanpainchaud that the system usually only keeps 2. I did find once, when I did a rollback recently, that a third kernel was retained for a little while until the next update. You could always mount the boot partition and manually delete the extra. Perhaps backup the partition contents somewhere just to be safe.

sudo mount /dev/sda1 /boot

Note: Your boot partition may be a different one...

sudo rm /boot/EFI/com.solus-project/<kernel|initrd>

Note: Replace with the appropriate kernel and initrd to be removed