/boot size

[Chris Lumens]

For RHEL7, I've got a bug about needing to make /boot larger. For once,
it's not a private bug so I can even show you:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1270883

The fix is to make /boot larger so more kernels can fit, say, 1GB. It's
not a big change but it raises a bigger point. If I make this change
just for rhel7-branch, it will be a regression when we get to RHEL8. To
prevent that from happening, I also need to make this change on master.
But that will affect all new installs of Fedora.

Does anyone think that is going to be a problem? Does it need to be
discussed more widely first?

- Chris

[Jason L Tibbitts III]

CL> The fix is to make /boot larger so more kernels can fit, say, 1GB.

Doesn't Fedora have the same basic issue, though? My 500M /boot volumes
are nearly half full and I don't install the kernel-debug packages.

- J<

[Ross Smith]

I don't think it will be an issue. I've already been bitten by this with a
~1300 efi booted desktops and would welcome the updated configuration.

Kickstart based installs probably already set a value for this partitions,
and everyone else would be happy to not run into yum errors when they
can't install the newest kernel.

Post by Jason L Tibbitts III
CL> The fix is to make /boot larger so more kernels can fit, say, 1GB.
Doesn't Fedora have the same basic issue, though? My 500M /boot volumes
are nearly half full and I don't install the kernel-debug packages.
- J<
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[Chris Lumens]

Post by Jason L Tibbitts III
CL> The fix is to make /boot larger so more kernels can fit, say, 1GB.
Doesn't Fedora have the same basic issue, though? My 500M /boot volumes
are nearly half full and I don't install the kernel-debug packages.

Yep, Fedora would definitely have the same problem. I'm just curious if
Fedora is going to want to solve it in some different way or what.

- Chris

[Chris Murphy]

Post by Chris Lumens

Post by Jason L Tibbitts III
CL> The fix is to make /boot larger so more kernels can fit, say, 1GB.
Doesn't Fedora have the same basic issue, though? My 500M /boot volumes
are nearly half full and I don't install the kernel-debug packages.

Yep, Fedora would definitely have the same problem. I'm just curious if
Fedora is going to want to solve it in some different way or what.

Maybe the dual booters with small drives might bug eye at a 1G boot
partition? But in the short term (year?) I'm not expecting a Btrfs
switch where /boot on Btrfs as a subvolume avoids the concern of
wasted space; so if it needs to get bigger, the only different way I'm
thinking of is make it 750M?

But I regularly keep 5-8 kernels including debug kernels and I'm not
seeing this kind of space consumption. I've got kernel 4.5.2 nondebug
and kernel+initramfs+system.map takes up 30M in /boot, and 4.6.0.rc4
debug takes up 31M. So...? Fedora uses hostonly initramfs. Is that a
factor? Even if I go that route, it's only 59M for the debug kernel
and its initramfs and map. I don't hit 250M with four of those, let
alone 500M. What am I missing?

[Chris Murphy]

Post by Chris Murphy

Post by Chris Lumens

Post by Jason L Tibbitts III
CL> The fix is to make /boot larger so more kernels can fit, say, 1GB.
Doesn't Fedora have the same basic issue, though? My 500M /boot volumes
are nearly half full and I don't install the kernel-debug packages.

Yep, Fedora would definitely have the same problem. I'm just curious if
Fedora is going to want to solve it in some different way or what.

Maybe the dual booters with small drives might bug eye at a 1G boot
partition? But in the short term (year?) I'm not expecting a Btrfs
switch where /boot on Btrfs as a subvolume avoids the concern of
wasted space; so if it needs to get bigger, the only different way I'm
thinking of is make it 750M?
But I regularly keep 5-8 kernels including debug kernels and I'm not
seeing this kind of space consumption. I've got kernel 4.5.2 nondebug
and kernel+initramfs+system.map takes up 30M in /boot, and 4.6.0.rc4
debug takes up 31M. So...? Fedora uses hostonly initramfs. Is that a
factor? Even if I go that route, it's only 59M for the debug kernel
and its initramfs and map. I don't hit 250M with four of those, let
alone 500M. What am I missing?

I installed CentOS 7 and can't reproduce this. It's only using 188MB
with five kernels, three of which are debug.

https://paste.fedoraproject.org/359257/46151936/

Is this possibly related to kdump? Is it possible for stale kdump
files to accumulate and that's what we aren't seeing in the RHEL bug
report? How big can those get? Maybe they shouldn't be going on /boot?
In a single update, the used space jumps 181M, but that doesn't seem
related to kernel (debug or not) installations. Debug kernels don't
use that much more space.