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The latest Linux kernel now takes more than half of my /boot space. Next time I want to upgrade, how do I do that? Can I purge the current in-use kernel and then issue aptitude full-upgrade or do-release-upgrade? Seems dangerous and with possible side effects (loss of config?)

$ df -h /boot Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda1 236M 166M 58M 75% /boot $ du -hc /boot/*5.11.0-18* 249K /boot/config-5.11.0-18-generic 117M /boot/initrd.img-5.11.0-18-generic 5.8M /boot/System.map-5.11.0-18-generic 15M /boot/vmlinuz-5.11.0-18-generic 137M total

Or is the only solution to boot from liveCD, chroot into your system, delete the current kernel and install the new one ?

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  • My install of impish has initrd.img-5.11.0-18-generic at 87.2MB. Where are you getting your oversize version. Includes some testing data? Commented Jun 15, 2021 at 14:34
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    You will have to extend your /boot partition because it will be painful each time you want to install a new kernel. Also, your initrd is unusally large as if it includes a lot more drivers or boot scripts than necessary. Commented Jun 15, 2021 at 14:35
  • I asked about extending /boot in another thread (unix.stackexchange.com/questions/654214/…) but it just looks too risky and complex. As for shrinking the kernel by removing unused drivers, I know how to do that manually by editing .config (I program embedded systems) but I have no idea how to do it on Ubuntu. Commented Jun 15, 2021 at 20:00

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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I managed to halve the size taken by the initrd and associated files by simply changing MODULES=most to MODULES=dep in /etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf

I left the compression unchanged as it was already using lz4 which, I believe, is currently the better compression ratio.

Then run sudo update-initramfs -u -k all to have it take effect, and reboot to test.

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