2d ago

is this not enough boot space on debian 13?

apparently my problem is I cannot update initramfs:

update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-6.12.41+deb13-amd64 zstd: error 70 : Write error : cannot write block : No space left on device

After checking KDE Partition Manager for /boot and /boot/efi both have free space left:

/boot size: 488 MiB

/boot used: 396.26 MiB

/boot/efi size: 512 MiB

/boot/efi used: 10.52 MiB

dpkg -l | grep linux-image | awk '{print$2}' shows:

linux-image-6.1.0-37-amd64

linux-image-6.1.0-38-amd64

linux-image-6.12.41+deb13-amd64

linux-image-amd64

I am now using debian 13 on linux-image-6.1.0-38-amd64 because linux-image-6.12.41+deb13-amd64 won't load from grub2. I don't want to get rid of linux-image-6.1.0-37-amd64 till I solve this issue

11 comments

I ran into a problem like this once, and after banging my head against the wall for days it turned out the solution was just running

sudo apt autoremove
That took care of removing a bunch of old stuff in the boot partition that I will not pretend to understand.
With the size of modern linux kernels, I think 1GiB for a /boot partition is the absolute minimum I would go for a current full-sized distributuon. You'll run into these out-of-space issues on updates all the time otherwise.
Related to this, there is a note in the release notes for upgrading to Debian 13: https://www.debian.org/releases/trixie/release-notes/issues.html#ensure-boot-has-enough-free-space
It mentions an increase in the minimum requirements for /boot partition.
Not having a separate boot partition is the way I roll, I think. The way debian stores old kernels even 1gb wouldn't be much.
Checking the /boot size on my Fedora install, I partitioned out a gibibyte for the 3 kernel plus recovery kernel setup, which takes up about 338 MiB in total. Depending on out-of-tree kernel modules and bootloader modifications installed, your initramfs images could be larger. A few things to look for:
the size of your current initramfs and vmlinuz image(s)
any kernel modules you needed to install alongside your system (v4l2-loopback, nvidia, realtek, etc.)
If there are other large files present in the boot partition
If everything there looks fine and/or is necessary, you might need to expand your /boot partition (either reinstall if new system or offline partition shrinking, moving after a data backup if you have personal files you care about).
- or offline partition shrinking, moving after a data backup if you have personal files you care about
  what you are saying is: copy all your data to another drive, expand the boot partition shrinking the main storage drive and then copying back?
  
  More or less yes, minus the copying files back if the operation was successful. You must be careful shrinking partitions as it is very easy to destroy them, and I'd have to guess the partition layout looks vaguely (EFI System Partition (/boot/efi), Boot (/boot), Root (/), ...), which would require shrink and move of the partition before or after /boot. If you're unfamiliar with shrinking a partition, a bit of reading into how it is done for your filesystem will be required. Different setups, ext4, btrfs, lvm, LUKS, etc. will have different requirements.

11 comments