Boot partition run's out of space

Support
1

Hi all,

I’ve got some issue with free space on the boot partition.

My YunoHost server

Hardware: VPS bought online
YunoHost version: 11.2.30 (stable)
I have access to my server : Through SSH | through the webadmin | direct access via keyboard / screen | …
Are you in a special context or did you perform some particular tweaking on your YunoHost instance ? : no

Description of my issue

Today I’ve got this warning from diagnosis:
The storage /boot(on device /dev/vda1) has only 7.3 MiB (3%) free space (out of a total of 213 MiB). Be careful.

This is what’s in the boot partition currently
grafik

I don’t know why it happened and what I can do about it.
Has someone an advice for me?
Thanks.

2

Hi, a quick search on the forum might lead you to Can't update/install apps : dpkg/APT seems to be in a broken state, no space left, missing firmware

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3

You can delete unused kernels

4

Thanks.
so sudo apt autoremove got rid of 1 Kernel out of 4.
I ask myself though, will this happen again when the next Kernel is updated?

Is the boot partition too small in the first place (if yes why?) or does the automated deletion of Kernel’s not work? I’ve never had this Problem before with other Yunohost Installations. I’ve a 30GB partition, so plenty of space. Not sure why /boot is so small or maybe that normal and auto-deletion isn’t working.

for ref. listing the currently installed Kernel is with

dpkg -l | grep linux-image

in my case it’s

rc  linux-image-5.10.0-16-amd64           
rc  linux-image-5.10.0-29-amd64           
ii  linux-image-5.10.0-30-amd64           
ii  linux-image-5.10.0-31-amd64           
ii  linux-image-5.10.0-32-amd64           
ii  linux-image-amd64

further removal of Kernels with e.g. for the oldest one in the list -16-
sudo dpkg --purge linux-image-5.10.0-16-amd64

However, removing this single Kernel -16- (with dpkg) did not free more disk space in /boot because I guess there where no entries in /boot (checked with ls -als)
Same goes for -29-
When I’ve tried -30- I got an error message that the Kernel is in use.
I was able to delete -31- and it did free some more space on /boot

I did do a reboot of Yunohost and things seem to be OK.
So there there are still the open questions of why the problem occured and if it will happen again.

5

it feels like base install of Debian makes the /boot partition way too small?

but i’ve never had the problem of it filling up though in the past 3 years. i’m on baremetal.

i’m not a kernel expert but this is my info, if this helps people.

df -H
/dev/nvme0n1p1         499M  6.2M  493M   2% /boot/efi

dpkg -l | grep linux-image
rc  linux-image-5.10.0-28-amd64           5.10.209-2                                     amd64        Linux 5.10 for 64-bit PCs (signed)
rc  linux-image-5.10.0-29-amd64           5.10.216-1                                     amd64        Linux 5.10 for 64-bit PCs (signed)
ii  linux-image-5.10.0-30-amd64           5.10.218-1                                     amd64        Linux 5.10 for 64-bit PCs (signed)
rc  linux-image-5.10.0-31-amd64           5.10.221-1                                     amd64        Linux 5.10 for 64-bit PCs (signed)
ii  linux-image-6.1.0-23-amd64            6.1.99-1                                       amd64        Linux 6.1 for 64-bit PCs (signed)
ii  linux-image-6.1.0-25-amd64            6.1.106-3                                      amd64        Linux 6.1 for 64-bit PCs (signed)
ii  linux-image-amd64                     6.1.106-3                                      amd64        Linux for 64-bit PCs (meta-package)
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6

on 2 larger installations, my /boot partion is also quite full. Only 9% / 13% free space, but I’ve never received a warning about that.
/dev/sda2 974M 81M 826M 9% /boot

/dev/sda2 974M 116M 792M 13% /boot

Now I’m thinking that auto-delete of Kernels only kicks in when the boot partition is almost full. If so, then the warning seems to be unnecessary.

the YH docs state the following and it IMO implies one has to manually delete old Kernel :thinking:

/boot Kernels and boot files Do not move unless you know what you are doing. It can happen that too many kernels are kept, it is possible to do some cleanup.

I think in the future I will ignore that warning about low space on /boot since I’ve never manually deleted a kernel so far (unless someone says this is a new thing)

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