/boot partition 100% full

[Eraser]

Yesterday I discovered my server had problems running apt upgrade. It seemed that the /boot partition was 100% full. I removed some old kernels manually since running apt autoremove didn't work either. Apt apparently needs some free space to work.

Now, /boot is 98% full, which is still critical in my opinion. I have ran apt upgrade and apt autoremove. I rebooted and ran apt autoremove again, but old kernels does not seem to go away automatically. What am I doing wrong? I'm started to wonder if running apt update | apt upgrade is considered dangerous for my server if this could result in an unstable situation. I know for fact that if /boot is full my server won't boot normally. How do I fix this without the need to manually remove old kernels from time to time?

 

[mgiammarco]

Hi,
usually autoremove works, but sometimes it may have problems. I suggest you to check manually until you see that autoremove starts working again correctly.

 

[fabian]

you do need to manually remove kernels from time to time, there is no way around it.

 

[Dunuin]

Usually "apt autoremove" deletes all but 3 or 4 kernels. If you manually install them they won't be autoremoved.
Newer PVE installations (done with PVE8) will also use a 1GiB instead of a 512 MiB ESP, so /boot won't be filled up that fast.

 

[fabian]

/boot is different than the ESP though - we don't set up a separate /boot for ages.. although the same issues apply to both /boot (if on its own partition) and /boot/efi of course.

 

[Eraser]

you do need to manually remove kernels from time to time, there is no way around it.

That's too bad. But thanks for the clear answer.

Usually "apt autoremove" deletes all but 3 or 4 kernels. If you manually install them they won't be autoremoved.
Newer PVE installations (done with PVE8) will also use a 1GiB instead of a 512 MiB ESP, so /boot won't be filled up that fast.

/boot already is 1GiB. The kernels are probably pretty big, or I have allot.

/boot is different than the ESP though - we don't set up a separate /boot for ages.. although the same issues apply to both /boot (if on its own partition) and /boot/efi of course.

This server has a separate /boot because Proxmox was installed on top of Debian. The host (Hetzner) probably uses an image for Debian that contains a separate /boot.